Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) is being republished by NYR Books, and Vivian Gornick rereads it for The Nation. His thesis: American fiction is structurally adolescent. Love sits at the center of the Western novel, but the American hero marries or flees. So does the American novelist. “The moment at which Flaubert was dreaming Madame Bovary was the moment when Melville was finding Moby Dick.”

What Fiedler found when he went looking for the reason:

  • The male hero is “a man on the run, harried into the forest and out to sea, down the river or into combat — anywhere to avoid ‘civilization,’ which is to say, the confrontation of a man and woman.”
  • Mature women are largely absent from the canon; when they appear they are “monsters of virtue or bitchery, symbols of the rejection or fear of sexuality.”
  • The compensation is homoerotic companionship between boys who never become men — the “innocent homosexuality” he had already mapped in his 1948 essay “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!”
  • He traced the misogyny forward to the proletarian thrillers of Hammett and Spillane, a genre “undressing its bitches, surveying them with a surly and concupiscent eye before punching, shooting, or consigning them to the gas-chamber.”

Fiedler was not a feminist. There is no Wharton, no O’Connor, no Shirley Jackson in his book — no women writers at all. He simply refused to look away from the absence and made critical use of it, which is different from, and less than, wanting it to end. Gornick notes that Hawthorne punished and mocked the “emancipated ladies of his own time” in The Blithedale Romance — Zenobia, who asks “Did you ever see a happy woman?,” must die for having sinned in the flesh — but “still sees the situation clearly.” She suspects that was enough for Fiedler too.

Her turn against the book comes as the evenhandedness wears on. Neutrality is not urgency, and eventually she wanted exasperation on behalf of the women being made literary use of. She finds the type in Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Augustine St. Clare, who knows slavery condemns the South to hell everlasting and cannot bring himself to endorse abolition, preferring slavery to the risk of social chaos. Fiedler, “nothing if not a man of his time, just as St. Clare was a man of his,” catalogued an evil everyone in 1960 acknowledged and everyone could live with. That is the book’s strength and its limit — it stopped at seeing the situation clearly, in an era that badly needed someone to stop seeing clearly and start doing something.