An Unworthy Hero
YAGODA, BEN
An Unworthy Hero The Last Best Hope By Peter Tauber Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 628pp. $10.95. Reviewed by Ben Yagoda ... we're really waiting for some divine hero to reveal our central theme,...
...Yet this talent is abused, too...
...He appears to have special knowledge in at least three fields-baseball, theoretical physics and biology-and misses no opportunity to slip in irrelevant digressions about them...
...The bed moved.'" (I'd say it was a parody of Hemingway if I didn't know better...
...the next year, he joins the Presidential campaign of Eugene McCarthy, then that of Robert Kennedy, less out of commitment than aimlessness and bypasses the Chicago convention ("I think we'll sit it out," he says...
...Tyler's political consciousness is next to nil, and presenting this sweet-talking jock as the conscience of a generation is degrading to the truly committed activists of the '60s...
...And it is this burden that sinks The Last Best Hope...
...Tauber's view is to some extent, I think, a valid one...
...His interpretations are often apt, if occasionally rather facile and overblown, and it is good simply to be reminded of all that happened such a short time ago...
...we hear so many wisecracks that they soon become oppressive...
...Every hero becomes a bore at last.-emerson Emerson notwithstanding, this country has traditionally relished its heroes...
...Two years later, he is just an observer, working (reluctantly) for the government again, when he meets his untimely end at Kent State...
...For a moment, however, the opportunity for valor rearose...
...What this does to Tauber's ideas about the impossibility of heroism in the '60s, I'm not quite sure...
...The bullies won, and in time the nation sank into the predicament described in an epigraph to Tauber's book by a "Student in a suburban Boston high school, October 1971": "Your generation was lucky...
...Take this gem: "'Tyler,' she gasped, biting her lip...
...The nation was divided against itself, the "establishment" had alienated the young, and fewer and fewer people still believed in the traditional American values...
...From these suggestions, and a hundred others, we know Tyler is supposed to be a "Representative Man" (Emerson's phrase) of his generation...
...What does his life tell us about the social forces that shook this country in the late '60s...
...it is a crutch that lets us avoid hard questions...
...tyler Bowen...
...You want to know what I would ask for if I had one wish...
...His flailing about for some anchor that will steady his tale is not helped by his penchant for the cliche...
...He saves the lives of a general, himself and a few others by single-handedly knocking out an enemy stand, thereby winning the Medal of Honor...
...With Tyler as the focus, the force of the events of '67-'70 is diffused through a screen of amiability...
...we're really waiting for some divine hero to reveal our central theme, to symbolize our best meaning and galvanize the whole stew...
...You already had a few years to believe in something before it all fell apart...
...certainly it is potentially a fine thematic backdrop for a novel...
...But I know it illustrates the predicament of a novel whose situations alternately belie or are unworthy of its themes...
...More specifically, it must satisfactorily answer the questions it prompts: Why is Tyler Bowen the "last best hope" (the words are Lincoln's, describing the United States in 1862) of his generation...
...Tauber seems to be suggesting that by 1967, things had deteriorated to such an extent in America that the possibilities for heroism, or, indeed, honorable action, had become severely limited...
...Still, in a novel, the failure of content and theme to mesh can only mean disaster...
...But the symbolism does not work, mostly because Tyler is neither a convincing everyman for '60s youth nor outstanding in an interesting or significant way...
...Willie Bowen, fighting in an unwanted, confusing war, writes to his brother: "If you have any kids...
...His signing up with McCarthy is presumably meant to represent the flowering of hope, his death at Kent State its withering...
...Tyler Bowen, the young protagonist of Peter Tauber's new '60s-novel (a kind of work that by now deserves, I think, to be classified as a genre), is hardly a figure from deep in spiritus Americanus...
...Smith, to Sylvester Stallone's Rocky Balboa, to the countless anonymous or joint creations of American popular culture, the hero has told us what we want to know: about ourselves, about the past, about what-under the best circumstances-can be done...
...Nor does he cut that valiant a figure on the momentous occasions of his time: Fresh from college when the book opens, in 1967, he serves his country as a PR man at a government think-tank in Arizona, not in Vietnam...
...But hero-worship has a flip-side: Weems' conception of Washington had little to do with the man himself, Mr...
...Tauber believes 1968 was one of those magical years when things had the chance to fall apart and rearrange themselves in wholly new ways: "There was a need for love, and help, and heroes who could heal...
...We are left with an at best mildly interesting love story, plus the author's discrete observations about the era and narratives reporting some of its key happenings...
...We all know what became of the dream...
...don't name any for old Willie, OK...
...I wasn't any hero...
...optimists, faithful naifs, romantics, gathered in the People's name, to battle against the bullies...
...Catch it on the tube...
...More seriously, the author plays unfairly when he has us believe that Tyler's brother, Willie-who does end up in Southeast Asia-has died in battle, then reveals several chapters later that he was hiding out in a Vietnamese village all along...
...You get by, you survive...
...I wish there would be like God or Jesus maybe or Bobby Kennedy-for real...
...Another area of expertise is humor (according to a publicity release, he is a sometimes professional comedian), and he does give his characters a lot of funny lines...
...Nevertheless, Tauber obviously means for Tyler to wear the hero's mantle...
...And don't let 'em think I was some kind of hero in some kind of war or anything, no matter what...
...Ironically, the only parts of The Last Best Hope that are effective as fiction are Willie's Vietnam scenes...
...Smith was appallingly naive, and Rocky gave license to hidden racial antagonisms...
...After all, this is a good-looking broth of a lad who starred on the playing fields of Ithaca, and who, before the novel is 100 pages old, has broken up a fistfight and saved a 10-year-old from Ferris-wheel death...
...The glorification of individuals always necessitates simplification and distortion of the complexities, contradictions and compromises reality entails...
...Ironic, because despite his own protests, Willie really does turn out to be a hero in the old-fashioned mold...
...Tauber is also something of an intellectual show-off...
...Not that Tauber doesn't have other novelistic failings...
...Ultimately, though, it is on its interpretation of a turbulent time, its hypotheses about the relations between an individual and his society-in other words, as an historical novel-that this book must be judged...
...But the trick in all serious historical fiction-not an easy one-lies in linking ideas to character and plot, and Tauber doesn't come close to mastering it...
...With my generation, all we ever knew was that they all lied...
...His girl, Johanna, rightly says, "Things don't happen to you...
...One of the most annoying is his propensity for sending the reader on narrative wild-goose chases...
...The main problem is Tyler Bowen: He is simply too much of a nice, middle-class guy to be the hero of anything, much less a novel that purports to have historical import...
...The author commits these trespasses because his overlong novel suffers from a drastic lack of focus...
...The placenames alone are enough to evoke that mood-new Hampshire, Chicago, Kent State, Washington, People's Park...
...Tauber's answers to the questions he raises are inadequate or confused, and his theories about the need for heroes are in no way justified...
...From Parson Weems' General Washington, to Frank Capra's Mr...
...What exactly is the meaning of his fortuitous death...
...The chapters describing the rape of Tyler's girl and the lengthy trial of her assailant, for example, are totally without justification...
Vol. 60 • November 1977 • No. 23
