The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo (review)

Tuning in to cnn, I happened to catch the story of a middle-school kid in the Midwest who was riding his usual bus home when he noticed the driver had slumped over the wheel Thinking quickly, the youngster commandeered the wheel and, with the help of a friend who worked the brake, pulled the bus off the road to safety, cnn had dubbed the kids “School Bus Heroes.”

Heroes?

It is not to diminish the kids’ gutsy actions, but when it comes to heroes, contemporary American culture suffers from an embarrassment of riches. Like other terms that once held privilege and gravitas in the American imagination—like “visionary,” “soul,” “prophet”—the word “hero” has been so widely (mis)appropriated as to have become devaluated, even diminished. Twenty-four-hour news channels routinely elevate cancer researchers, firefighters, soldiers in harm’s way, missionaries in remote postings among the poor and diseased, muckraking journalists, patients who overcome disabilities, celebrities who raise money for disaster victims, athletes who make late-game plays, convenience store clerks who thwart late-night burglaries, and, well, two kids who pull over a school bus—it goes on and on. Far more disturbing, of course, is the suasive power of fantasy heroes. For those under, say, twenty, heroes exist in an entirely symbolic landscape, in pretentious graphic novels (read: comic books), cheesy summer action flicks, multi-volume fantasy epics, animated movies, and, supremely, video games. We begin to lose the dimension of the authentic hero, that rare iconic figure, subtle and nuanced, able to give voice and direction to a culture’s evolution, to embody a people’s greatest aspirations and its noblest failures.

Of course, what has noticeably given way in any discussion of heroes in the last generation or two is the privileged position literature once held and its role in the American experiment to define the distinctly American hero. Books? Unless they are set in alternative universes with enchanted unicorns and magic stones, books ... well, in these latter days of the Age of Reading, being a good reader has the same quaint nostalgia of being, say, a good butter churner. But before we eulogize literature and surrender to the coaxing pull and easy argument of image technologies, you might pause to consider, indeed relish, the breadth and reach of the implications of Stephanie S. Halldorson’s probing study, a striking reminder that contemporary American literature, seriously conceived and passionately committed to its cultural moment, can still, even in these dreary post-post-whatever-we’re-in era, rise to the occasion, can still define for its era the parameters of its highest aspiration, and can still engage without simplification the implications of the American endeavour even as it is being played out, reclaiming the grandeur of the kind of heroes who, unlike the faux-heroes that pop up seasonally at the Cineplex or daily on cnn, are subtle, nuanced, provocative, and who invite us to engage our cultural moment and the implications of where we all stand, characters who prick us, intrigue and perplex us. Halldorson reminds us early on that Pynchoris shabby schlemiel, which has become the dominant manifestation of contemporary American literary heroes, need not be the last word. We are, as it turns out, better than that. Contemporary heroes, in an intricate dynamic with those legions of non-heroes, struggle with their identity in an endless process of definition and redefinition (unlike ancient heroes who undertook a single grand journey); they defy the status quo, asserting both intellect and heart amid and against their vacuous culture of ashes and shadows, images and surfaces.

For scholars of postwar American fiction, Halldorson’s study rescues two towering figures from their own critical legacy. Saul Bellow has become decidedly old school, unjustly marginalized amid the hip academic excesses routinely lavished on much lesser novelists who...