Marginalia

Unheroes welcome

by paul reidinger

A FRIEND OF a friend – or maybe a friend of a friend of a friend – scolded a famous young novelist recently for stocking his famous novel with unpleasant people. The characters' uniform nastiness, she told him, made the book unreadable for her. He sheepishly accepted her critique. They went on with their dinner. I like to think that at the end of the evening they clinked together their glasses of grappa in a gesture of reconciliation ... but perhaps not, grappa being an acquired taste.

While I am sympathetic to a prospective reader's being thwarted by a lack of human sympathy in some ballyhooed novel, or indeed any work of the imagination, I am also inclined to think that readerly expectations of attractive protagonists – the good, old-fashioned word here is hero – is ... old-fashioned. This modern world is, after all, full of unheroes, from the legions of self-absorbed and self-indulgent postwar American brats (of which, sadly, I am one) to the various religious fanatics masquerading as leaders who are so very busy orchestrating our present symphony of holy wars.

The modern story has no hero. For me the perfect example of this postulate was the Clinton impeachment, an immorality tale with a mob of crazed witch-hunters on one side and, on the other, a careless roustabout of a president whose famous predilection for fast-food french fries suggested his indifference to exercising anything like adult discipline over his appetites, including lust for big-hair interns. Clinton's thighs, swaddled in too-tight jogging shorts as he huffed through Rock Creek Park, were a running joke, so to speak, throughout his administration, but his impeachment was a black comedy in which everyone looked bad and the only question was who looked worse.

The fact that there are no longer any heroes – in literature, in public life, anywhere except possibly the movies – doesn't mean we don't yearn for them. We even elect the occasional pretender to high office in the hope that, by translating him from action-flick stardom to the governorship of the largest state in the Union, we will find ourselves with a bigger-than-life governor: a real hero.

This yearning has not gone unnoticed in faraway Washington, D.C., where in February the Bush administration published a federal budget replete with 27 photos – many of them aspiringly heroic, with fluttering flags and so forth – of the commander in chief, he of the flight suit and the artfully staged fighter-plane landing on the USS Mission Accomplished (since mothballed, or perhaps discreetly scuttled). One gleans this detail, comic and horrifying in the signature tradition of this comic-horrible regime, from Paul Krugman's The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century, the just-published paperback edition of which (Norton, $14.95) contains an additional year's worth of The New York Times' most scathing columnist's scathing commentary on the fraud-pocked administration of George W. Bush.

Just as Sept. 11, 2001, was a kind of geopolitical jujitsu – the turning of our own strengths and technologies monstrously against us by a medieval mob – so the spinning of Bush 43 as a hero is an attempt to exploit, for political advantage, a fundamental proclivity and weakness of the American electorate: our desire to believe that our president is a wise and honorable figure who will selflessly act in the public interest and shrug off the private, personal consequences. Many of us accordingly feel some reluctance to believe that our own government, our own president, would distort intelligence information, mislead the Congress and the country as to a matter of war, use the threat of terrorist attack for partisan political gain – and who knows what else. Yet the facts are now clear, if not heroically uplifting, on these questions.

The great irony in the life and public career of George W. Bush is that he is very much a man of his troubled and warped times. Yes, he is reflexively dishonest, smirky, smug, vindictive, foulmouthed, self-regarding, cowardly, and entitled – but in all those qualities he is not so terribly different from his peers, we the great mass of baby boomers and post-baby boomers, who have grown up in this overripe land of plenty and always have assumed that the sluicing of the world's wealth into their – our – hands is the natural state of affairs, the way things are supposed to be, our due. For are we not Americans, et cetera?

It is not only unrealistic but unwise to expect that the fiction of these times would reflect other than these ugly realities. For a large part of fiction's enduring value is as a record of a people and an era. When I was in college, the reading lists of all my history classes were heavily leavened with literature, from The Canterbury Tales to Buddenbrooks; it is through literature that we gain some sense of what people in remote ages and places thought about and talked about, what their days were like, how they experienced life. And some day some college student may read the famous young novelist's famous novel and not recoil from its foul characters but, by understanding their distempers as a reflection of the larger distemper in which they were obliged to live, pity them – er, us.