Leslie Fiedler, a man of learning and intelligence, has composed another of those fascinating catastrophes with which our literary scholarship is strewn. Love and Death in the American Novel seems to me destined to become a classical instance of sophisticated crankiness; it rides a one-track thesis about American literature through 600 pages of assertion, never relenting into doubt by qualification, and simply ignoring those writers and books that might call the thesis into question.

"Our great novelists," writes Fiedler, "though experts on indignity and assault, on loneliness and terror, tend to avoid treating the passionate encounter of a man and a woman … they rather shy away from permitting in their fictions the presence of any full-fledged, mature woman, giving us instead monsters of virtue and bitchery, symbols of the rejection or fear of sexuality." The "failure of the American novelist to deal with adult heterosexual love" leads to, or...