Shields likes short stories more than novels, and essays and memoirs more than fiction. Reality-based art, he says a little mysteriously, “is a metaphor for the fact that this is all there is, there ain’t more.” Like most aesthetic manifestos, his book is an argument for realism; it’s just that he prefers his kind of realism to that of traditional fiction, which strikes him as fake. Certain writers must thus be plucked and praised (Proust, because he is really an essayist; Chekhov, Beckett, Lydia Davis, Joan Didion, Thomas Bernhard, Lorrie Moore, Elizabeth Hardwick), or certain works plucked approvingly from a writer’s oeuvre, because they fit the terms of the manifesto (Nabokov’s “Speak, Memory,” David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” the prologue to “Slaughterhouse-Five”—“the best thing Vonnegut ever wrote,” Shields says).

And certain writers must be jettisoned from favor. Since Shields does not like to offend anyone, does not choose to define any of his terms or do any literary criticism, and fills most of his book with contextless quotations from other writers (most of which are not flagged as such in the text), it is hard to divine exactly what or whom he dislikes. When he approvingly cites D. H. Lawrence’s “Studies in Classic American Literature” (because it represents what he nicely calls “the critical intelligence in the imaginative position”), and mentions it in a list of works that include Geoff Dyer’s “Out of Sheer Rage,” Barthes’s “S/Z,” and William James’s “Varieties of Religious Experience,” one assumes that Lawrence’s long novels “The Rainbow” and “Women in Love” have been placed, by silent contrast, in the debit column: too much narrative machinery? But perhaps this is unfair to Shields. (It would certainly be unfair to Lawrence’s relatively unconventional and very “reality-based” novels.) He quotes David Salle, in conversation with Janet Malcolm, who says that he is bored reading George Eliot or Tolstoy, because he is “bored by plot. I’m bored when it’s all written out, when there isn’t any shorthand.” (The two are discussing Thomas Bernhard’s great novel “The Loser,” which Malcolm found initially exciting, and then rather boring, unlike Eliot and Tolstoy.) Perhaps Eliot and Tolstoy have gone into Shields’s outer darkness, but who knows?

His complaints about the tediousness and terminality of current fictional convention are well-taken: it is always a good time to shred formulas. But the other half of his manifesto, his unexamined promotion of what he insists on calling “reality” over fiction, is highly problematic. A moment’s reflection might prompt the thought, for example, that Tolstoy (who so often reproduced reality directly from life) is the great “reality-artist,” and a powerful argument against Shields’s anti-novelistic religious fury. When one first reads Tolstoy, one feels the bindings being loosed, and the joyful realization is that the novel is stronger without the usual nineteenth-century appurtenances—coincidence, eavesdropping, melodramatic reversals, kindly benefactors, cruel wills, and so on. It is hard to imagine a writer more obviously “about what he’s about.” Strangely enough, using Shields’s aesthetic terms and most of his preferred writers (along with some of those he seems not to prefer), a passionate defense of fiction and fiction-making could easily be made. Perhaps he will write that book next.

Shields may be imprecise and overwrought, but I found myself thinking of his useful skepticism while reading Chang-Rae Lee’s new novel, “The Surrendered” (Riverhead; $26.95)—a book that is commendably ambitious, extremely well written, powerfully moving in places, and, alas, utterly conventional. Here the machinery of traditional, mainstream storytelling threshes efficiently. The action of the narrative ranges from Manchuria in 1934, and the Korean War, in 1950, to New York City in 1986, and, finally, Italy. There are enormous, withering set pieces: a Korean girl sees her mother and sister blown up; the daughter of American missionaries in China is forced to stand by while her parents are killed, and is then nearly raped by Japanese soldiers; a Korean orphanage is burned down; a dying woman, once an orphan of the Korean War and now a middle-aged American businesswoman, travels to Italy in search of her estranged son. Many of these scenes are piercingly evoked, and the novel is so spacious in design and reach, so sensitive to historical catastrophe, that it seems churlish to bridle. Yet in the aggregate this slabbed magnificence seems, if not melodramatic, then certainly stagy, even bookish, a livid libretto, something made for the novel rather than made by it.

Lee’s most original novel is still his first, “Native Speaker” (1995), published when the author was just twenty-nine. It is not formally or linguistically daring—none of his work is—but it exhibits a quiet avant-gardism of content, for it was one of the first works of fiction by a Korean-American to describe, with subtlety and insight, the difficult hyphenation of immigrant experience. Its narrator, Henry Park, works as a spy for a private-detective agency, Glimmer & Company, in New York; Lee cleverly renovates elements of the traditional detective thriller, by making spying at once banal (one of Henry’s jobs is to track a rising Korean-American politician) and emblematic of a wary immigrant caution, a sleeplessness poised between assimilation and alienation. Henry Park says that he chose spying because it appeared to be “the perfect vocation for the person I was, someone who could reside in his one place and take half-steps out whenever he wished.” Deeper than the episodes describing Henry Park’s work are the vivid portraits of his immigrant parents, in particular his father, a Korean grocer who is austere and reticent but also vain about such things as his dense dark hair, and has a certain sense of himself as always on the verge of larger success: “He bore that small man’s folly of sometimes seeing himself in terms historical, a necessary evil, as if each apple or turnip or six-pack he was selling would be the very one to catapult him toward a renown he could only with great difficulty imagine for himself.” As in everything that Lee writes, there are many elegantly exact images: “We ate the food in near silence, the Korean family way, bent over the steaming crocks and dishes like scribing monks.”

By the time he published his second novel, “A Gesture Life” (1999), a familiar Chang-Rae Lee narrator had begun to emerge: a finally solitary man, who has difficulty knowing himself, is efficient at repression, and has been abandoned by women who do not care to plow the rest of their lives into emotional archeology. “A Gesture Life” is narrated by a courtly Japanese-American pharmacist, now in his seventies, who lives in a comfortable suburb outside New York. Franklin (Doc) Hata has done well in America—he is proud of his fine Tudor house, with its slate pool, and proud, too, of his singular status in a notably un-diverse enclave. Like the narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Remains of the Day” (to which Lee’s novel is clearly indebted), Doc Hata cultivates a slightly servile blandness, which hides deep agitations. He is tormented by his estrangement from his adopted daughter, Sunny (an orphan from Korea), and by memories of his wartime service in Burma. In his mind, he returns repeatedly to the brutal mistreatment of five Korean women, who were brought to the Japanese military camp to service the men in a so-called “comfort house.” “A Gesture Life” is a harrowing novel (the Burmese scenes are bloody), but a magical one, too, waterlike in its mysteriously lucid transit. Its successor, Lee’s third novel, “Aloft” (2004), seems feebler, a thematic poor cousin. Again, a male narrator, Jerry Battle, gradually discloses a world of turmoil and abandonment—a wife who drowned in a swimming pool, a pregnant daughter who has cancer, a son who is bankrupting the family business. It lacks the pressure of Lee’s first two novels: Jerry Battle, an Italian-American, is not as complexly bound up as Henry Park and Doc Hata in the making of an immigrant’s life of successful gestures. Without that productive social anxiety, the novel relaxes too easily into suburban familiarity, and the plot stresses (sad daughter, tricky son, ailing mom) quickly become clichéd and histrionic.