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

This monograph announces itself with a grandeur befitting its subject matter. Whether through brashness and cerebration, as with Bellow, or through coolness and ironizing, as with DeLillo, these writers have told stories of American experience that attest to its multiplicities – of peoples to meet and places to go and things to buy. Equally so, if by way of different stresses and approaches, Bellow and DeLillo also explore the paralyses and liberties that come of these multiplicities in the playing out of individual lives. For Halldorson, the hero’s status in postwar American life is at the heart of Bellow and DeLillo’s interests. This traditionally unifying and saving figure, Halldorson proposes, retains considerable presence in contemporary American culture, even while that very culture fissures under a series of philosophical and political pressures. Bellow and DeLillo, she contends, write about the hero mindful of the figure’s fraught position: ‘They admit to both an impulse for the heroic narrative and the impossibility of its realization as a belief in reality.’ A page later, Halldorson supports this premise by describing the difficulty faced by protagonists from two early Bellow works: ‘Like Joseph in Dangling Man, Augie [March] is torn between his impulse toward the heroic and his desire to get out of a heroic narrative he cannot imagine how to complete.’ In a later chapter focused on DeLillo’s White Noise, Halldorson draws a persuasive distinction between each author’s sense of the relationship between self-knowledge and self-seeking: ‘[Jack Gladney] is unlike Bellow’s heroes in that he is not looking to find the authentic, but is eager to find the inauthentic that will cover and console his fear.’

This study would have been far more successful if such winning formulations were more substantively informed. Halldorson’s work is too frequently obscure on the concept of hero, and it’s starkly under-researched on dimensions of us cultural, literary, and intellectual history. Halldorson’s efforts to define the figure of the hero are scattershot at best. Brief commentaries on relevant works by Twain and Emerson fail to establish the richness of literary-cultural context in which to place Bellow and DeLillo, while her engagements with scholarship on the figure of the hero, whether in American culture or in Western literature, are little more than summary-citations. Her own definitions of hero verge on the impenetrable: ‘When the audience of non-heroes is pushed beyond simply feeling the potential to be heroic to a need to prove themselves heroic, the traditional loop between heroic narrative and audience is conflated into the paradoxical assumed hero in which non-heroes are asked to be both leaders and followers of their own narrative.’ Her interest in commodity accumulation as the American hero’s only certain (if thus vexing) imperative is incisive, especially when thinking about DeLillo’s work, but Halldorson shows no knowledge of authoritative works on the subject like Christopher’s Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Jackson Lear’s Fables of Abundance, let alone Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class. The book’s more basic problem is its limited presentation of the authors’ own works. In effect, Halldorson offers full analyses of two novels by each writer – Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King and Mr Sammler’s Planet, and DeLillo’s White Noise and Mao II. The readings themselves can be very good, especially when they take precedence over Halldorson’s theorizing and summary-citations of other critics. But Halldorson never addresses the question of why she chose to bypass a fuller exploration of works that would seem natural choices for her study, such as Bellow’s Augie and Herzog and, more glaringly, DeLillo’s Underworld and Cosmopolis. In the latter case, a discussion of DeLillo’s most ambitious book to date is limited to two quotations, while Cosmopolis appears in her bibliography but nowhere else. That novel in particular, which...