The Fiction That Got Nicknamed 'Kmart Realism'

Minimalist fiction is easy to caricature as short sentences and cold rooms. JSTOR Daily's description of the style is more useful than that: its language is direct, highly compressed and densely allusive, and much of what matters is left unstated. The reader has to decipher what a character actually wants, because motivation is inferred rather than explained out loud. That withholding is the whole engine of the form — a story that spells out the motive turns into a summary of itself. The subject matter helped give the style its joking name: minimalism is often associated with working-class characters, domestic life and marriages coming apart, a combination that earned it the nickname “Kmart realism.”