Fair points being brought up, and interesting observations IdleRich — I'd like to think about that "natural" shift towards naturalism more...
Re: modernist/postmodernist fiction more closely "resembling life" — I won't quibble with that entirely but I have to say that I find the people in DeLillo, say, wholly unconvincing as compared to people in Tolstoy. That's obviously "the point" as far as DeLillo is concerned, but you might say that his fiction is only concerned with resembling life in certain particulars. (I know you didn't mention DeLillo but I'm not that familiar with the authors you have mentioned, although it's another obvious point to make that Burroughs — so far as I can recall — in 'Naked Lunch' isn't concerned with presenting reality 'as is' but through a satiric, Swiftian distortive lens).
I guess you were replying to me saying "I like literature that teaches me about life" - Just to say, I wasn't attacking modernist/postmodernist novels there, more reflecting on my prioritising of "wisdom" over "aesthetics". I am highly aware of this because I so love the translated stories/novels of authors like Chekhov/Tolstoy/Flaubert, where I can't appreciate what they did with language. I can appreciate other aesthetic aspects such as structure but generally I'm not in it for the language, I'm in it for how it enriches my perspective on people and "life".
I'm not sure why my reading is so retrograde and conservative. Perhaps I was corrupted by Harold Bloom? Doesn't seem unlikely. (Though he was a big fan of Pynchon, for example.)
Maybe I should go out of my way this year to read more fragmented post-modern books? I read 'Cosmopolis' a few years ago and enjoyed it quite a bit. I'm not anti DeLillo, not anti McCarthy, not anti Roth...
One of the virtues of the novel, in fact, is that it's so expansive that it can be all manner of things. How closely does Moby Dick resemble Pride and Prejudice? And how closely does Ulysses resemble Middlemarch?