A couple of years ago, Zadie Smith wrote an essay in the New York Review of Books comparing Tom McCarthy's Remainder (see below) with Joseph O'Neill's acclaimed novel about cricket in post-9/11 New York, Netherland. As the essay's title – "Two Paths for the Novel" – suggested, Smith saw the two books as exemplifying competing strands within western literature: Netherland was a "lyrical realist" novel in the mould of Balzac and Flaubert, while Remainder was heir to the works of 20th-century experimentalists ranging from Joyce and Kafka to Donald Barthelme and William Gaddis.

In healthy times, Smith said, these two traditions – the realist and the avant garde – would comfortably co-exist. But "these aren't particularly healthy times", and one reason for this is that the experimentalist tradition has been "relegated to a safe corner of literary history", dismissed as a "fascinating failure". As Smith put it: "A breed of lyrical realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked." In order for our literary culture to rebalance itself, she suggested, more writers need to follow McCarthy in attempting novels that set out to challenge the dominant realist mode.

Whether or not one agrees with her assessment of Netherland and Remainder, it's hard to quibble with Smith's contention that avant-garde fiction, at least in Britain and America, isn't flourishing. For many, the death of David Foster Wallace in 2008 represented the end point of a project that had become synonymous with obscurantism, pretentiousness and boredom. In Britain, which has its own lively tradition of literary experimentation, ranging from Virginia Woolf's excursions into consciousness to BS Johnson's eccentric games with form (including his notorious 1969 "shuffle" novel, The Unfortunates) there is little sense of mourning for the passing of the avant garde. As Smith noted, a kind of fatalism has entered our literary culture, a sense that all other routes have been tested and found wanting. The well-made realist novel, inherited from the 19th century, is what we are stuck with now, and even if we aren't excessively fond of it, it seems to be pretty much all we have.

But is this the case? The assumption that genuine experimentation is no longer possible is in many ways a parochial quirk of the anglophone world. Things are very different, for example, in Latin America, where anti-realist techniques have long been part of the mainstream, and where the recent success of writers such as Roberto Bolaño and César Aira (see right) shows that novelists can still be lauded for striking out in new ways. France may not be the hotbed of literary radicalism that it once was, but the avant-garde tradition represented by the likes of Georges Perec – famous, among much else, for writing a novel without the letter "e" – continues to be venerated.

Closer to home, there are a notable few who remain committed to experimentation. David Mitchell, the author of Cloud Atlas, is hardly an avant-garde figure – his novels are too mainstream for that – but with his twisting, time-bending narratives, he is a high-profile example of someone doing something different. And this month there's a double reminder that experimentation is still possible, with the publication of Tom McCarthy's new novel, C, and the Collected Stories of American author and translator Lydia Davis. McCarthy and Davis are in many ways antithetical figures: while McCarthy is something of a literary showman, a disseminator of maverick manifestos, Davis keeps herself out of public view, and offers few explanations for what she is doing. But in their different ways, both writers help us see that, where fiction is concerned, it is a mistake ever to assume that there should be limits on what is possible. Even if, as Zadie Smith says, lyrical realism has the run of the highway now, there are still a few slip roads down which others might go.

Stewart Home: Cut and paste



Stewart Home is a kind of subcultural chameleon, capable of playing many roles: artist, pamphleteer, film-maker, activist, hoaxer and writer. Born in London in 1962 , he has spent his adult life immersed in leftist counterculture. "One day in the spring of 1982 I woke up and decided I would be an artist," he said. He formed a punk band, created a "one- man movement" known as "Generation Positive" and founded the parodic art fanzine SMILE, before becoming involved with the underground "anti-art" Neoism movement. Home also loves playing pranks: after claiming in a magazine that he had witnessed an arms dump involving musician Jimmy Cauty, the unfortunate guitarist was arrested while the police raided his house.

But Home is best known as a novelist. Radical in form and content, his books brashly flout conventional ideas of the "literary", mixing filth and the highfalutin and plundering a diverse range of sources. Home's deployment of collage techniques makes him an experimentalist in the tradition of William Burroughs, while his preoccupation with moral subversion and explicit sex draws parallels with Henry Miller and Jean Genet. Slow Death (1996) follows the progress of a sexually voracious skinhead who attempts to take on the art establishment, while 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess (2002) charts a bizarre erotic relationship through a cut-and-paste collage of pornography, political theory and occult conspiracy. His most recent novel, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, merges penis enlargement junk emails with philosophical pontification to strangely comic effect. Anna Winter

Cesar Aira: Forward motion



One of Argentina's leading contemporary writers, César Aira specialises in short, roughly 100-page novels that he churns out at a rate of up to four a year. His productivity is partly explained by his credo of el continuo, or forward motion, which involves making up his plots as he goes along and never revising his work. His fiction is at the more playful end of the experimental spectrum, leading one critic to brand him "the Duchamp of Latin American literature". In one of his books, a character drowns in a vat of ice cream; in another, a mad scientist dreams up a plot to clone Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes. His most recent work to be translated, Ghosts, concerns the apparitions who inhabit an almost completed luxury apartment block in Buenos Aires. Like Roberto Bolaño, Aira sees himself as an adversary of the likes of Márquez and Fuentes. Interest in him, particularly in the US, is growing and it seems likely we'll be hearing lots more about him. William Skidelsky

Ben Brooks: Emotional montage



It was picking up a £1 secondhand novel that set British schoolboy Ben Brooks writing. The book was Noah Cicero's The Human War, a savage tirade set two hours before the start of the Iraq conflict. Up until then, Brooks explains, he was reading, "just classics mainly, like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and stuff". That and "pretty awful set texts" – because, despite having three published novellas to his name and another on the way, 18-year-old Brooks only finished school a month ago.

At 16, he began sending his writing to James Chapman, who runs Fugue State, a small New York press devoted to experimental novels (including The Human War). Brooks's first, Fences, was published by them last year and its "emotional montage" style sent ripples across the Atlantic. He's also become known for what he calls "the font thing" – using text size as a sort of punctuation, so that some words whisper and others loom large. The unbound quality of these visual crescendos and diminuendos is echoed in the style of his imagery: all torrents of poppies and floods and liquid gold.

Youth has its downsides: "None of the books I've written do I particularly like any more," he says equably. But, he adds, "it's good for picking up girls and stuff." Hermione Hoby