McGuire also uses this idea of pragmatic realism to mount a larger defense of contemporary realist writing and uses Ford's example to argue that realism itself remains a useful and necessary critical category. Contemporary realism, rather than being merely conventional or reactionary, as some of its critics have called it, can offer its proponents an aesthetically and philosophically sophisticated way of engaging with and contesting the particularities of contemporary, even postmodern, experience.

In offering this new reading of Richard Ford's fiction, as well as a fresh understanding of the realist impulse in contemporary American fiction, both become richer, more resonant, and more immediate--reaching both backward into the past and forward to involve themselves in important contemporary debates about history, postmodernity, and moral relativism.