Review: Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (1966)

[truepenny]

Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie A. Fiedler

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is a comprehensive discussion of American novels, from the first novel written in America (The Power of Sympathy: or, The Triumph of Nature, 1789)---before that, actually, since he starts talking about novels with Clarissa (1748)---up to the current productions in the 60s. It is engaging and entertaining, and I do genuinely feel I learned a good deal from it.

However, it has major drawbacks. Fiedler is enlightened for 1966, but---while he admits that (white) women and Black men write novels, and is even enthusiastic about Invisible Man---it never occurs to him that either (white) women or Black men have subject positions (and Black women do not exist). He completely falls for Humbert Humbert's story in Lolita, and never questions that OF COURSE a twelve-year-old girl seduced him and OF COURSE HH is the injured party. And he is quite unnecessarily catty about Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," calling it an "unwitting travesty" of the American adaptation of Kafka by writers like Nathanael West and Isaac Rosenfeld (492). In general, he suffers greatly from the idea that literature should be divvied up into highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow (with such gradations on the scale as "upper middlebrow," which is where I stopped being annoyed and just became amused by his posturing). Only highbrow literature is worth consideration and highbrow literature is, of course, only written by men. (George Eliot/Mary Ann Evans would get a pass, I think. But, being English, she does not get discussed.) The vast audience of novel-reading women merely serve to drag potentially highbrow male authors down to their middlebrow level. He is dismissive of science fiction, and detective fiction after Poe, and although he clearly loves the gothic, he only loves it if it remains pure and does not debase itself with what he calls "horror-pornography."

It is also notable and instructive that I do not recognize the names of most of the (white male) writers he mentions after WWII.



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Comments

[radiantfracture]

It is also notable and instructive that I do not recognize the names of most of the (white male) writers he mentions after WWII. That's very satisfying. I almost want to read this just to smile smugly at him.

[larryhammer]

This.

[heresluck]

Oof. Yeah. I read this book for prelims and enjoyed it very much (I am a sucker for engagingly-written literary criticism -- there's so little of it, argh), but I was giving large chunks of it the side-eye even then. Also, I *did* recognize the names of most of the post-WWII white male writers... but only because their names had appeared on the "genre: novel" prelims list from ~1975 (!) that I used as one starting point for my own list, and I had had to negotiate with my prelims committee to remove them because a) I had not heard of most of them before seeing that list, and b) I needed to make room for more interesting and relevant works, most of them written by people who were not white, male, and/or American. To the committee's credit, I did not have to negotiate very hard. Heh.