For a decade or so Leslie Fiedler has been a kind of wild man of American literary criticism. Although there have been useful insights in the essays he has written, he has repeatedly gone further than he could hope to take his readers with him. It has been clear, indeed, that he hasn't wanted to take them with him; he has wanted to give them a kick in the pants.

Now he has written a book, a huge book, called "Love and Death in the American Novel" …, and, happily, it turns out to be almost completely free from bad-boy antics. Here is no juvenile effort to outrage the Philistines, but a serious and impressively well-informed attempt to look at American fiction in a new way. It is only once in a while that Fiedler turns smart aleck, notably in a brief comment on Theodore Dreiser and in a...