Why the American Novel Refused to Grow Up
“He made chutzpah a literary form!” proclaims a blurb on the back cover of a collection of essays and stories by the literary critic and enfant terrible Leslie Fiedler. It is just the sort of affronting remark that Fiedler was known to venture, and there’s reason to suspect that he wrote the blurb himself; the telltale sign is that it concludes with his favorite jolt of punctuation. Exclamation marks, generally rare in works of sober scholarship, are strewn with abandon throughout his classic and controversial study “Love and Death in the American Novel,” originally published in 1960 and reissued by New York Review Books this spring. The book, Fiedler’s most important and most notorious, was designed to unsettle what he once derided as “the conventional reasonable voice of our typical criticism.” The result is an incredible repository of vexations, bafflements, witticisms, and brilliancies. Ostensibly a history of American fiction from 1789 to 1959, it is in fact “a kind of gothic novel,” as Fiedler described it, with a quick pulse and a wry, expansive style. It is also erudite and impressively wide-ranging, treating books both high and low, veering with ease and humor from Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” and the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne to long-forgotten potboilers.
Leslie Aaron Fiedler was born in New Jersey in 1917, within fifteen years of his fellow-critics Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe, yet he feels worlds apart from those decidedly postwar figures. They are creatures of the mid-century, whereas Fiedler belongs, in spirit, to the nineteen-sixties. Not only was he arrested, in 1967, “for permitting marijuana to be smoked” in his house (an allegation that he indignantly denied), he infamously recommended that high-school teachers read the New Age guru and psychedelic enthusiast Timothy Leary to better relate to their students. In Fiedler’s later years, when he developed a full-blown passion for chasing trends, he was only too happy to play the part of the improbably hip elder, sporting an unkempt beard and defending the worst sort of poptimism (“It seems to me the novel is intrinsically much more like TV and comic books than it is like prose epic”) in a 1974 appearance on “Firing Line.”
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But it was not always so. Until the start of the seventies and especially throughout the fifties, Fiedler was discerning without being snobbish, avant-garde without being faddish. He took a Freudian and Jungian tack long before such methods became commonplace in the academy, reading books’ unconscious longings and phobias through the scrim of their overt proclamations. Literature, in his view, was a susurrus of stifled screams, a missive from the netherworld of the collective imaginary. The American novel served as an inadvertent guide to the country’s cultural “mythologies”—one of Fiedler’s most frequently repeated words.
He débuted his tactics in 1948, when he scandalized the literary establishment by publishing “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” in Partisan Review, the flagship journal of the intellectual élite. In those pages, Fiedler dared to argue that many of America’s boyish and putatively innocent classics are in fact fantasies of interracial, homosexual romance. Novels like “Huckleberry Finn” and “Moby-Dick” represent a vision “so sentimental, so outrageous, so desperate, that it redeems our concept of boyhood from nostalgia to tragedy,” a dream in which the white settler is embraced by those “he has most utterly offended,” those he has enslaved and colonized.
“Love and Death,” which expands on the thesis first introduced in “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in” for five hundred exhilarating pages, was ahead of its time in ways both good and bad. It anticipated the sociological style of reading that has since become de rigueur in English departments, for which the book was heartily chastened when it first appeared. Howe accused Fiedler of “putting literature on the couch” and reducing writers to “cases,” and the anonymous author of a Briefly Noted review in this magazine lamented that “Mr. Fiedler is mettlesome and learned; what he still needs to learn is that novel-writing is an aesthetic, not a sociological, activity.” Subsequent scholars would beg to differ, sometimes at the expense of more evaluative or humanistic modes of reading.
But there is one respect in which “Love and Death” is antithetical to the academic tradition it predated. It is a polemical, spirited salvo that never pretends to be a work of dispassionate social science. Its tone is decisive, but it speaks with the imperious authority of taste, not the desiccated one of surveys and statistics. Fiedler earned a Ph.D. in English at the University of Wisconsin and spent his life in various universities, first as a professor at the University of Montana, where he taught from 1941 to 1965, then at the University of Buffalo, where he remained until he died, in 2003, but he never submitted to the sclerotic conventions of academic writing. “I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis,” he once confessed in a review. “I long for the raised voice, the howl of rage or love.” And, in “Love and Death,” how he howls!
The book starts exactly where America did: in England. By Fiedler’s lights, Samuel Richardson’s novel “Clarissa,” from 1748, is the founding document of Anglophone fiction. The novel as we know it began with the spectacle of seduction—with the titular Clarissa trying (and failing) to evade the clutches of the dastardly Lovelace. In its archetypal form, the seduction plot features a sybaritic aristocrat who attempts to debauch an upstanding daughter of the bourgeoisie. His victim, in her unassailable purity, resists him, thereby proving that the arrivistes populating the ranks of England’s most upwardly mobile class had a moral edge over the nobility.
It is frustrating—and characteristic of his somewhat monomaniacal approach—that Fiedler does not consider, alongside the seduction plot, its obvious complement, the marriage plot. “Clarissa” follows a nobleman who rapes a virtuous woman, but Richardson’s other seminal contribution to the development of the novel, “Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded,” from 1740, offers a similar narrative with a happier ending: Pamela, a servant, rejects the advances of her wealthy employer and thereby induces him to marry her. Still, Fiedler shows convincingly enough that American writers’ attempts to adapt the seduction narrative to our concerns—to reimagine it so as to preserve our enduring sense of ourselves as innocents—explain our literature’s peculiar aversions and resultant compensations.
In its original form, however, the seduction plot was a European specialty. It flattered its largely bourgeois audience by vilifying the aristocracy and entrenching this new class’s mores—by effectuating what Fiedler characterizes as “the bourgeois redefinition of all morality in terms of sexual purity.” In what Fiedler called the “Sentimental Love Religion,” a doctrine that the seduction plot popularized, women were objects of worship, too immaculate to deflower. Marriage was the ultimate good, akin to a kind of deliverance, but any actual, physical consummation could come only at the cost of violation.
How could a plot so particular to a European context be transposed to ours? In a 1948 essay, Trilling enumerated “the things which are lacking to give the American novel the thick social texture of the English novel—no state; barely a specific national name; no sovereign; no court; no aristocracy; no church; no clergy.” Fiedler is right to note that Richardson’s “class-determined fable had to be adapted to the needs of a society quite different from the one which had bred it.” Similarly, he continues, the gothic confections that flourished in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century made little sense in the brave New World. Books like Ann Radcliffe’s “The Italian,” from 1797, and Matthew Gregory Lewis’s “The Monk,” from 1796, depicted “symbols of authority, secular or ecclesiastic, in ruins—memorials to a decaying past.” They were set in crumbling castles and moldering dungeons—that is, amid the rubble of a collapsing social order.
But America was terra nova, and to write about its literature is “to write about the fate of certain European genres in a world of alien experience,” Fiedler concludes. At the country’s inception, it fancied itself, in Fiedler’s words, “an escape from culture and a renewal of youth,” a “world without a significant history or a substantial past,” a realm that would “play out the imaginary childhood of Europe.”
It is no surprise that an avowedly juvenile country would produce an avowedly juvenile fiction. Many of our classics, like “Huckleberry Finn,” are about children, and many more masquerade as adventures for children: the “Leatherstocking Tales” of James Fenimore Cooper, the haunted offerings of Edgar Allan Poe, even the magisterial “Moby-Dick,” which for stretches presents itself as a jaunt aboard a boat (or so Fiedler argues). All of these works proffer visions of escape from civilization and thereby from maturity. Their protagonists tend to be runaways—men who join whaling expeditions in their haste to dodge the malaise that sets in on shore, boys who board rafts floating down the Mississippi to evade their guardians and their chores. Stylistically, these books are often surreal and oneiric, with the gauzy texture of childhood reverie. “Our fiction is essentially and at its best nonrealistic, even anti-realistic,” Fiedler writes.
A world without a past—a world of eternal infancy—must be a world without sex, and in Fiedler’s eyes no literature is quite as pathologically prudish as ours. Even as European writers were aging out of the Sentimental Love Religion and confronting the dramas of adultery in novels such as “Madame Bovary,” from 1856, and “Effi Briest,” from 1895, their American counterparts remained too squeamish and too genteel to face up to their carnal appetites. Fiedler writes, for instance, that Theodore Dreiser “came of the kind of people who copulate in the dark and live out their lives without ever seeing their sexual partners nude.” Dreiser’s subject was not lust but the “consequences of seduction,” his tone not erotic but didactic. In his work, women were still ethereal innocents who had yet to become believable human beings.
Our female characters have always been casualties of the Sentimental Love Religion, and, in the eighteen-hundreds, they became children, excluded from the domain of sexuality by virtue of prepubescence—or, better yet, by premature death. Little Eva, the cloyingly saintly child in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1851-52), succumbs to an illness and is thereby rescued from the prospect of adult sexuality. “There lies before the Little Evas of the world no course of action that would not sully them,” Fiedler observes. Even if they wed, as upstanding women must, they will be “tinged no matter how slightly with the stain of sexuality.’’ This logic reaches its natural conclusion in the work of Edgar Allan Poe, in which necrophiliac imagery abounds. “The only safe woman,” Fiedler writes mordantly, “is a dead woman.” Even authors who refrained from killing off their female characters may as well have, for all the complexity their stick figures attained.
Many writers did not even attempt to depict anyone but men, and Fiedler notes that many of the greatest American books stage retreats from “the world of women to the haunts of womanless men.” On the Pequod in “Moby-Dick” and the raft in “Huckleberry Finn,” there is room for a “pure marriage of males—sexless and holy, a kind of counter-matrimony.” That this counter-marriage is often between a white man and a man of color (Ishmael and Queequeg, Huck and Jim) removes it even further from the suffocating confines of polite society. In both of these novels, actual sex is displaced, supplanted by horror and violence—the killing of the whales in “Moby-Dick,” the tarring and feathering of a pair of ruffians in “Huckleberry Finn.”
In Europe, it is the past that haunts and terrorizes; here, in the realm of ahistoricity, it is our own illicit desire that pursues us through our nightmares. Where the European gothic had identified horror “with the super-ego,” with the restrictive customs of a dying culture, the American gothic “identified evil with the id,” with suppressed lusts. In 1960, summarizing “Love and Death” in a review, Trilling wrote that American writers “conceived the scene of terror to be not in ancient castles and the gruesome vaults of ruined abbeys, that is to say, not in the political and social past, but in forest and cave,” in the outer wilderness that represents and reflects the wilderness within.
Some of Fiedler’s readings are irresistible: the homoerotic subtexts in “Moby-Dick” are so overt that they are practically texts. Some are adventurous but plausible enough if you squint: Huck and Jim share such a powerful affection that I can be talked into detecting a sexual twinge in their more extravagant endearments. But sometimes Fiedler is downright unconvincing. Are Henry James’s heroines, surely among the most extraordinary female characters in literary history, really one-dimensional idols? Is the subject of “Lolita,” a book that pays painstaking attention to its eponym’s desperation, really “the seduction of a middle-aged man by a twelve-year-old girl”? And, while we’re at it, is “Moby-Dick” really a children’s book in any respect? And doesn’t James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room,” published in 1956, four years before Fiedler’s study, grapple directly with queer sexuality?
Whether Fiedler is entirely right, however, is the wrong question. A work of this magnitude, with a thesis this ambitious, can be right only from certain angles and in certain lights. But a five-hundred-page study of the American novel which is incontestable at every turn would have to be a work of rote description, not one of impassioned interpretation—that is, it would have to be tedious. Fiedler is capable of aggravating us but not of boring us. What makes “Love and Death” so worth reading is also what makes it so worth disagreeing with.
Several of its omissions are galling indeed. In a 1960 review in The New Republic, Howe wrote that the book “rides a one-track thesis about American literature . . . never relenting into doubt by qualification, and simply ignoring those writers and books that might call the thesis into question.” There is something to this complaint. It is only by overlooking countervailing traditions in American literature that Fiedler can wrangle his material into some semblance of linearity—and, worse, he often declines to discuss writers who bear directly on the themes and tropes he is examining.
He is very good on the ways in which male writers have flattened and fetishized women in American fiction—and very bad at engaging directly with the work of female novelists, or even noting that they exist. With the exceptions of Stowe and Radcliffe, few women writers receive any appreciable treatment in Fiedler’s book. Edith Wharton, in particular, is clearly relevant to his theme yet glaringly absent from his study. Not only did she write a novel about adultery that corresponds almost exactly to the classic seduction schema as he describes it, but her corpus demonstrates that American literature did eventually evolve to accommodate several of the Anglophone novel’s original themes. Once the scions of the old Dutch families had ossified into a sort of aristocracy, we Americans embarked on adulterous affairs just as injudiciously as the Europeans.
“Love and Death” was not the only work in which Fiedler went too far. In 1970, he published “Cross the Border—Close the Gap,” a very interesting and very misguided essay that, to its credit, identified the major question of its era (and ours): whether books, confronted with cultural marginalization, must retrench and become cheap entertainment in order to survive. Fiedler thought so, and his painful keenness to “keep up” explains the irrelevance of his later work, so desperately modern that it now seems irretrievably dated. “The traditional novel is dead—not dying, dead,” he thundered, before confidently predicting that Henry James would be ejected from the canon, where he is entrenched to this day, and that there would soon be a resurgence of enthusiasm for the nineteenth-century writer James Fenimore Cooper, who remains an obscure curiosity (though he does feature prominently in “Love and Death”).
Still, what matters most is not whether Fiedler’s work is unimpeachably scholarly but whether it is fun, which “Love and Death” most certainly is, even and especially when it is also maddening. By Fiedler’s own admission, it is a book that is “trying to become itself as wildly Gothic, as full of grotesque jokes as, say, ‘Moby-Dick’ or ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ ” It does not demand to be accepted or rejected wholesale so much as it offers a framework for evaluating the national imaginary and our attendant art.
In the years since “Love and Death” first appeared, the social pressures that produced America’s finest grotesqueries have relaxed considerably. Queer desire is the explicit subject of novels by, among many others, Eileen Myles, Edmund White, and Garth Greenwell; the Sentimental Love Religion persists in a vestigial form in some quarters, but heterosexual sex, too, has come out of the closet. Philip Roth and John Updike can be accused of many things, but balking at full-frontal heterosexuality is not one of them.
Still, there is something fundamentally canny about Fiedler’s remark that “it is maturity above all things that the American writer fears.” And not just the American writer: we need only glance at the state of pop culture to see that the American actor, the American director, and the American public remain stunted. In addition to young-adult fiction that is bought and read by all too many not-so-young adults, and in addition to nominally literary fiction that nonetheless reads like young-adult fiction by the likes of Donna Tartt and Hanya Yanagihara (both of whom write parodic, sentimental exaggerations of America’s best gothic books), and in addition to the widespread phenomenon of middle-aged “Harry Potter” fandom, there is a glut of media for and about teen-agers: the television shows “Euphoria,” “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” and “Stranger Things,” the movies “Booksmart” and “Ladybird.” One of the biggest box-office smashes of recent years, “Barbie,” is about a toy; a film about Polly Pocket is reportedly in the works. The movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe are all adapted from comic books; “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” which came out in 2023, is based on a children’s video game.
These artifacts are pure escapism, impervious to the cataclysm of aging, impervious even to the paroxysms of sex. There is plenty of pornographic decoration in contemporary popular culture, but very little of it is consequential. Sex is still just a surface, a dirty magazine pilfered from the newsstand, an essentially puerile thing. Reviewing a pornographic film in 1959, Fiedler wrote that the women in it are oddly sexless, “not to be touched. . . . Unreal. Unreal. Unreal.”
Of course, as Fiedler demonstrates with such aplomb, juvenility need not yield aesthetic failure. In his reading, the incongruity between youthful fantasy and ever-encroaching adulthood—between the dream of outpacing the past and the reality of colonial violence—animates such masterpieces as “Huckleberry Finn” and “Moby-Dick.” These books are not in the least comfortably ensconced in their childishness: their protagonists are on the run because maturity is always at their heels. Huck’s mad race down the Mississippi prolongs a waning childhood even as it reveals the ultimate fragility of youth and the ultimate futility of efforts to stave off adulthood.
More recent novels, such as Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” from 1970, about a Black child who longs for blue eyes and the whiteness they represent, and David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest,” from 1996, about a precocious student at an élite tennis academy, also confront the incursion of adult tragedy into childhood idyll, albeit in very different ways. And the fiction of the past decade still contains its fair share of literal youths—the protagonist of Emma Cline’s “The Girls,” from 2016, is fourteen, and Ben Lerner’s “Topeka School,” from 2019, is in part about a high-school debate team—but it is perhaps above all our literary sensibility, as opposed to our subject matter, that remains underaged. After all, since Fiedler completed “Love and Death,” adolescence itself has transformed. What was once a poignant effort to extend a state of ingenuousness is now tainted from the start. No raft or whaling ship can outrun the corrosive ubiquity of the internet, which has turned high school into even more of a ferment of insecurity, compulsive inwardness, and anxious self-performance than it already was.
Instead of refusing to grow up, we merely fail to; instead of retreating to open waters, we keep clicking and posting. As adolescents who have been obliged to cultivate personae online have grown more self-conscious, so, too, has our literature, as nervously metatextual works of autofiction like Tao Lin’s “Taipei,” from 2013, and Lauren Oyler’s “Fake Accounts,” from 2021, attest. These books and many others in their cohort are so inflected by formative hours spent scrolling that they are the literary equivalents of the social-media profiles that teen-agers (and adults who have never quite outgrown teen-age tics) compulsively check and update.
Some novels in the autofictional tradition are snide and jejune; others, such as Lerner’s “Leaving the Atocha Station,” from 2011, and Sheila Heti’s “How Should a Person Be?,” from 2010, are superb. But none are quite adult in the rich, sophisticated way that Fiedler thought the best novels in the Continental tradition were. None are quite about the conflicting frames of reference and value that arise when an ancient cultural formation disintegrates and a successor has yet to take its place. It was the clash between opposing forms of life, one stale and encrusted, the other ascendant and disruptive, that drove the development of the European novel. Perhaps now that we are standing amid the ruins of the East Wing and the wreckage of the postwar liberal order—now that we, too, occupy an uncomfortable interregnum between two social formations—we will find it in ourselves to put away childish things and write something new. ♦