Middle aged, and having to his credit a substantial body of publications, Leslie Fiedler can no longer lay claim to the title of enfant terrible of American letters. After all as the dust jacket of his new novel somewhat smugly notes, Love and Death in the American Novel "is now being taught by the same people who were originally outraged by it." Yet even if he has moved perilously close to membership in the literary establishment Fiedler has shown little evidence of losing his refreshing talent for slaying dragons and tilting at windmills, his instinct for the jugular and the provocative.

So what is most surprising about The Messengers Will Come No More is that it is not provocative. It is dull. It works neither as fiction nor as polemic. As one of Fiedler's admirers who is occasionally vexed by him but usually pleased by his determined pugnacity...