Mean Difference examines the aesthetics, politics, and sociology of disparities that permeate through and are permeated by everyday encounter in modern and contemporary Anglophone fiction. Through readings of Henry James, Nella Larsen, William Faulkner, Sally Rooney, and Raven Leilani, I demonstrate the workings of what I term “mean difference”: the capacity of the minor, the contingent, and the casual to crystallize asymmetrical realities and power exchange; and the challenge of securing fixed meaning to difference’s most tacit signs. Looking back from a resurgent cultural interest in the microscopic processes of inequality in everyday encounters, for example in poetry by Claudia Rankine and recent sociology on microaggressions, I approach the role that modernist abstraction plays in not only registering but also revising differences at lower altitudes. Chapters treat high-stakes encounters in apparently modest conversational modes found in Faulkner’s depiction of racial opacity in face-to-face interaction; Henry James’s device of the imaginary observer; Nella Larsen’s representation of tactful female aggression; and millennial fiction by Sally Rooney and Raven Leilani that recognizes, with deep ambivalence, the limits of microsocial analysis in making a difference about difference in one’s personal life. While interested in the same elements that inform aesthetic and sociopolitical discourse on difference at the macro-levels of race, class, gender, and other large categories, the project maintains concentration with the small scale of the microsocial to interrogate the exemplarity of the situated encounter and the fungibility of feeling and framework in contemporary criticism. Asking how we square the phenomenological with the structural, I return to modernist abstraction for a body of work that encapsulates various artistically human problems for mediating identity. I examine this intra-social issue primarily in discursive spaces of feeling that blur what is said and what is meant; produce incongruities between dialogue and narrative; and require devices of observation that textualize the non-verbal. Taken together, the twentieth and twenty-first-century fiction under study portrays the ebbing eventfulness of non-schismatic encounters of difference.