Premium Harmony

Realist fiction is a mode committed to representing ordinary life with psychological plausibility and social detail, resisting melodrama and the supernatural in favor of the textures of work, family, money, and place. In the United States, 19th- and turn-of-the-century writers such as Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Henry James set the pattern that later 20th-century writers would expand on: Edith Wharton analyzed class and marriage, Sherwood Anderson invoked small-town voices, John Steinbeck and James T. Farrell depicted social struggle, and Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston showed how race, region, and power shape daily life. Even Modernists associated with stylistic experiment, such as Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, and Saul Bellow, often used pared language and close observation to make the ordinary legible and consequential. Across the century, Realism remained elastic, accommodating regional writing, immigrant narratives, urban naturalism, and domestic fiction, while adhering to its roots with recognizable settings, plausible causality, and characters with fates tied to specific social worlds.

By mid-century, Realism split into distinct currents. Post-World War II chroniclers like John Cheever and John Updike mapped aspiration and ennui in the American suburbs, while James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison pressed Realism to carry moral argument and historical memory through explorations of racism. The 1970s and 1980s saw the rise of minimalism and so-called “dirty realism,” associated with Raymond Carver (specifically referenced by King in his introduction to “Premium Harmony”), Tobias Wolff, Ann Beattie, and Joy Williams. Their stories favor compression, colloquial dialogue, and suggestive gaps, portraying socially marginal figures like bartenders, salesmen, babysitters, and couples in rented apartments, with emotion conveyed through withheld backstory and stubborn objects. Parallel traditions such as Southern Realism, Indigenous and Chicano/a Realism, and Midwestern farm fiction kept attention on region and class, while feminist Realists widened the lens on care work, desire, and the politics of the body.

One persistent subject for 21st-century American Realism is poor and working-class rural life, a subject that King explores in “Premium Harmony.” After 2000, many small towns have faced an intensifying mix of plant closures, wage stagnation, declining union power, and the consolidation of agriculture and retail into distant corporate hands. The “Walmartization” of commerce has shifted social space toward big-box parking lots and away from downtowns; convenience stores and dollar chains have filled gaps left by vanished grocers. Health insurance is precarious, fuel and heating costs are volatile, and credit card or payday-loan debt is common; aging trailers, rented farmhouses, and modest ranches need upkeep that families can barely afford. Smoking rates have remained high in many counties, and social services are thinly spread, so crises are often mediated by EMTs, school secretaries, and store managers. Churches, youth leagues, and volunteer fire departments still offer solidarity, but smartphones and social media have added a new layer of visibility, turning private misfortune into public spectacle within minutes.

The Realism of “Premium Harmony” thus resides not only in recognizable settings and plausible events but also in how social conditions leak into private emotion. Economic precarity is the background of Ray and Mary’s marriage, as evidenced by the argument about selling the house, the errand to improve the selling price of the home, and the small economies around cigarettes and snacks. Rather than addressing these social conditions directly, as was common in 19th-century Realism, King lets details and actions speak, such as questions on a form, a sheet pulled over a face, and a polite gift from a shaken manager. The result echoes Carver’s minimalism—short sentences, charged silences, an ending that refuses uplift—while remaining distinctly King in its attention to the thin membrane between tragedy and uncomfortable laughter.