In a trilogy of critical works, "Love and Death in the American Novel," "Waiting for the End," and now "The Return of the Vanishing American," Leslie Fiedler has been developing the thesis that … American culture is reverting to a savage, or at best barbarous state, which is simply a modernization of the state of affairs that existed before Columbus.

This is an amusing thesis, and it is easy to marshal facts and quotations to produce at least "a willing suspension of disbelief."… [He] treats fiction as poetry—as a symbolic criticism of values. Speculation based on the analysis of myth and symbolism can make anything out of anything, as witness the long career of fads in comparative religion, from Max Muller or Bachofen to Carl Jung or Robert Graves. Myths, archetypes, mother right, what makes the arguments plausible is not scientific method, but obsession.

Mr. Fiedler is possessed...