Holding out for a hero...

The Guardian is, over several days, printing a list of "1000 novels everyone must read". Now, leaving aside the fact (as raised by the person who drew my attention to this list) that if you read a novel a week it will take you almost twenty years to complete the task,something struck me about one of the reviews.

The review of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho says

"a scene in which the hero's former girlfriend has her hands nailed to the floor, her tongue cut out, and is then forced to fellate her tormentor before being killed"

and

"The hero, a young drugged-up, obsessively stylish Wall Street broker, also axes a gay man he encounters on the street and casually eviscerates the man's dog."

Maybe I'm wrong, but that doesn't sound much like a "hero" to me. Of course you can argue that in literature the word "hero" simply means "main protagonist" but surely it carries at least some implication of praiseworthiness or goodness. To me the hero of a novel is ,by definition, the good guy. He may be flawed, he may may be unpleasant, he may not be perfect, but he must be the good guy or he isn't the hero.

Well, I think so anyway.

Incidentally they have chosen to divide their list into some oddly arbitrary sections. Love, Crime, Comedy, Family & Self, State of the Nation, Science Fiction and Fantasy, and War and Travel. The ones for Love and Crime have been published so far. I have looked at both lists and can state that while I have read twenty three of those listed under crime I have read none of those listed under love.