Conventional literary histories of Latin America generally regard the “realist” novel as a creation of nineteenth-century Europe, exported to a Latin America that then simply reproduced it with some added local content. To escape concluding, perversely, that it had therefore already ceased to exist roughly a century ago, a contemporary history freed of such neocolonial ideology necessitates a theory of the Latin American realist novel as form. Fortunately, we can turn to the Brazilian critic Roberto Schwarz for such a theory. Deploying Schwarz’s mediational concept of an objective form that is simultaneously literary and socio-historical, this chapter proposes a differential typology of realism based on Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. Attributing realism to 2666 is, admittedly, more contentious than in the case of Mayta and Vargas Llosa’s more classically realist collective opus. But such a typology nevertheless reveals how the form of the novel itself may have shifted in relation to the reality of the nation and of national-popular collective life in Latin America: While, in Mayta, national-historical experience and realism remain organically linked to one another, the more problematic realism of 2666 appears, if anything, to have ruptured this bond.