(It is) a bit of a return to conventional realism( that follows any period of extreme experimentalism , ie modernism, postmodernism, pseudorealism). Postmodernism was an extreme realiization of the importance and the interrelatedness of story telling, history, autobiogrophy and real life, and essentially celebrated the fact that there is no distinction between what we say about our lives and the lives themselves. Actually, postmodernism only appears to be cynical in hindsight and that is only late postnodernism. Postmodernism was sort of light comic relief from the upper class elitist austerity of high modernism (anything by Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, TS Elliott, Ezra Pound etc). So postmodernism's essential message was not to take everything so seriously. So now we are in what's loosely and annoyingly termed post post modernism. You should read any interview by David Foster Wallace where he talks about postpostmodernism. People still produce modernist and postmodernist works nowadays and they are all incorporated in conventional realist revival.