I argue that young Lebanese novelists like Sahar Mandour and Hilal Chouman mobilize the ordinary as a way to ‘write out’ of the literary legacy of war and trauma writing that have characterized Lebanese fiction, without denying or suppressing Lebanon’s violent past. I go on to argue that this discursive move of ‘making ordinary’ allows these writers to focus on pressing contemporary issues, such as a rising sense of economic and urban precarity in Beirut. In doing so, I bring the literary into conversation with the sociopolitical and the urban. I also make the case that this ‘descent into the ordinary’ compels us, as readers, towards a more nuanced understanding of such interventions by Lebanese youth into the multiple temporalities and shifting landscapes of Lebanon’s postwar period.