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

Heroes—who needs them? Or, better put, who will stand up for them while keeping a straight face? The movies will surely keep giving them to us as long as there are Russell Crowes available to go off bearing a crossbow (rifle, sword, what have you) and saving the day. Meanwhile, TV has let the bad-guy-as-hero, once revolutionary, practically become a cliché in itself. But what about literature? Serious literature? And more to the point, literary criticism? Nobody there seems to be holding out for a hero. The institutionalization of the anti-hero, the general eclipse of the terminology of Joseph Campbell and the like in favor of systems, contested forces, historicism old and new, postmodernism's diminishment of agency—all these seem to have mitigated the mythos when it comes to the terms we find most useful to unpacking main characters.

Stephanie S. Halldorson is aware of these grounds for skepticism about her focus, and she pitches her book not as a study of the hero per se but of American perceptions of him (in this study, it is all hims). She works with a basic definition of heroes as figures in fiction who "[extend] themselves beyond normal human endurance...and [return] with a cultural, social, moral, or ethical lesson for the community" (6). But what Americans take to be heroes in their fictions are most often "assumed heroes" (8), she argues, "successfully marketed" (124) but not true journeyers, heroes who have been given the mantle "without the trouble of actually enacting an existentialist quest" (155). Moreover, she claims, the culture, in a distorted Emersonianism, encourages skipping over the difficult work of becoming a hero altogether, telling us in various ways that everyone not only can be but already is a hero. "America has become the triumph of the assumed hero" (117), and only the best novelists can chart the intricate, anxious ways in which we have rushed to fill the void of a heroless existence.

Halldorson is a fluid writer, and her sentences continually suggest a concern for both her own writing's aesthetics and those of the novelists she chooses to grant her attention. She has also chosen a topic—refreshing in today's literary criticism—that both Bellow and DeLillo would recognize as their own, a question they probed in making their literature. Too frequently, though, a vagueness creeps into Halldorson's writing, usually in support of a reader-response theoretical framework that seems quite operative in the Bellow chapters but less so in the DeLillo ones. At times the approach leads to too simple a mimeticism, as in these lines from the preface: "The reader has an impulse to the heroic (to help create the world) but does not have the ability to do so and, therefore, needs a character to do it for them [sic]" (xi). At other moments Halldorson is simply too cryptic: in reference to Mr. Sammler's Planet she asks, "The reader is in the position of coaxing an old man out of bed: what possible argument is there to move?" (84).

Halldorson elects to focus her chapters on pivotal works for each author's conception of the heroic—Henderson the Rain King and Mr. Sammler's Planet for Bellow, White Noise and Mao II for DeLillo—with ample attention throughout to other parts of each writer's corpus. The Bellow choices are both problem novels of a sort, and Halldorson does well in identifying the sources of Bellow's motives for breaking new ground and of critics' perplexity over the books' differences from the rest of his work. Her study illuminates the role of "fixer philosophies" in Bellow's characterizations and the surprisingly negative response to The Adventures of Augie March and subsequent changes in Bellovian heroism. While this four-book approach does allow Halldorson to navigate two large bodies of work, the long readings have a tendency to become...