Word: non-hero
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...Terra Arnata is plotless, guileless and garrulous. The non-hero is another of those nobodies who do nothing. The reader first meets him as a child playing God with potato bugs, and gradually watches him emerge pretty much as a bugged vegetable himself. In a series of widely spaced vignettes, portrayed as through a wobbly hand-held camera, he attends his father's funeral, makes desultory love to a nondescript girl in a hotel room, gets married, has a son, and finally dies. In between, he takes long walks, smokes endless cigarettes, compiles lists, uninventively takes inventories, floats cosmically...
...unbendingly British. Ultimately, what does Le Clézio in, is his decision to mirror his Life-is-shapeless-and-meaningless view in its own terms. All arbitrary mood and no movement can't help making for a dull book. "Nothing is necessary any more," concludes the non-hero cryptically as he is being buried. "But neither is anything unnecessary." That phlegmatic formulation ought to come as some sort of wan, stoical triumph. In context it seems pretentious and enigmatic...
...non-hero, non-artist protagonist and narrator of Brian Glanville's novel is all temperament and no talent. Geoff Barnes has won a medal for acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but he is no actor. The bed is his stage, and he is good for any number of encores. What he hankers for, yearns after, aspires toward but cannot reach is a more status-bearing life. He writes a play and it is a dud. He enters advertising and discovers he is no good at it. His only true emotion is self-pity; his agony...
RICHARD STRAUSS: THE LIFE OF A NON-HERO, by George R. Marek. The great romantic composer is viewed amidst a vivid evocation of cultural life in Germany -whose decay and upheaval after World War I, argues the author, was the primary cause of Strauss's disappointing later output...
...both the question and the answer in British Playwright Henry Livings' parable of an upsidedown, inside-out non-hero of a boiler-room custodian in search of hallucinogenic mushroom caps...