{"id":387,"date":"2026-06-06T10:38:27","date_gmt":"2026-06-06T10:38:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=387"},"modified":"2026-06-06T10:38:27","modified_gmt":"2026-06-06T10:38:27","slug":"why-the-american-novel-refused-to-grow-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=387","title":{"rendered":"Why the American Novel Refused to Grow Up"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cHe made chutzpah a literary form!\u201d 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\u2019s 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 \u201cLove and Death in the American Novel,\u201d originally published in 1960 and reissued by New York Review Books this spring. The book, Fiedler\u2019s most important and most notorious, was designed to unsettle what he once derided as \u201cthe conventional reasonable voice of our typical criticism.\u201d 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 \u201ca kind of gothic novel,\u201d 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\u2019s \u201cInvisible Man\u201d and the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne to long-forgotten potboilers.<\/p>\n

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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, \u201cfor permitting marijuana to be smoked\u201d 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\u2019s 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 (\u201cIt seems to me the novel is intrinsically much more like TV and comic books than it is like prose epic\u201d) in a 1974 appearance on \u201cFiring Line.\u201d<\/p>\n

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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\u2019 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\u2019s cultural \u201cmythologies\u201d\u2014one of Fiedler\u2019s most frequently repeated words.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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He d\u00e9buted his tactics in 1948, when he scandalized the literary establishment by publishing \u201cCome Back to the Raft Ag\u2019in, Huck Honey!\u201d in Partisan Review<\/em>, the flagship journal of the intellectual \u00e9lite. In those pages, Fiedler dared to argue that many of America\u2019s boyish and putatively innocent classics are in fact fantasies of interracial, homosexual romance. Novels like \u201cHuckleberry Finn\u201d and \u201cMoby-Dick\u201d represent a vision \u201cso sentimental, so outrageous, so desperate, that it redeems our concept of boyhood from nostalgia to tragedy,\u201d a dream in which the white settler is embraced by those \u201che has most utterly offended,\u201d those he has enslaved and colonized.<\/p>\n

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\u201cLove and Death,\u201d which expands on the thesis first introduced in \u201cCome Back to the Raft Ag\u2019in\u201d 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 \u201cputting literature on the couch\u201d and reducing writers to \u201ccases,\u201d and the anonymous author of a Briefly Noted review in this magazine lamented that \u201cMr. Fiedler is mettlesome and learned; what he still needs to learn is that novel-writing is an aesthetic, not a sociological, activity.\u201d Subsequent scholars would beg to differ, sometimes at the expense of more evaluative or humanistic modes of reading.<\/p>\n

But there is one respect in which \u201cLove and Death\u201d 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. \u201cI have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis,\u201d he once confessed in a review. \u201cI long for the raised voice, the howl of rage or love.\u201d And, in \u201cLove and Death,\u201d how he howls!<\/p>\n

The book starts exactly where America did: in England. By Fiedler\u2019s lights, Samuel Richardson\u2019s novel \u201cClarissa,\u201d from 1748, is the founding document of Anglophone fiction. The novel as we know it began with the spectacle of seduction\u2014with 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\u2019s most upwardly mobile class had a moral edge over the nobility.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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It is frustrating\u2014and characteristic of his somewhat monomaniacal approach\u2014that Fiedler does not consider, alongside the seduction plot, its obvious complement, the marriage plot. \u201cClarissa\u201d follows a nobleman who rapes a virtuous woman, but Richardson\u2019s other seminal contribution to the development of the novel, \u201cPamela; or, Virtue Rewarded,\u201d 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\u2019 attempts to adapt the seduction narrative to our concerns\u2014to reimagine it so as to preserve our enduring sense of ourselves as innocents\u2014explain our literature\u2019s peculiar aversions and resultant compensations.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s mores\u2014by effectuating what Fiedler characterizes as \u201cthe bourgeois redefinition of all morality in terms of sexual purity.\u201d In what Fiedler called the \u201cSentimental Love Religion,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

How could a plot so particular to a European context be transposed to ours? In a 1948 essay, Trilling enumerated \u201cthe things which are lacking to give the American novel the thick social texture of the English novel\u2014no state; barely a specific national name; no sovereign; no court; no aristocracy; no church; no clergy.\u201d Fiedler is right to note that Richardson\u2019s \u201cclass-determined fable had to be adapted to the needs of a society quite different from the one which had bred it.\u201d 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\u2019s \u201cThe Italian,\u201d from 1797, and Matthew Gregory Lewis\u2019s \u201cThe Monk,\u201d from 1796, depicted \u201csymbols of authority, secular or ecclesiastic, in ruins\u2014memorials to a decaying past.\u201d They were set in crumbling castles and moldering dungeons\u2014that is, amid the rubble of a collapsing social order.<\/p>\n

But America was terra nova, and to write about its literature is \u201cto write about the fate of certain European genres in a world of alien experience,\u201d Fiedler concludes. At the country\u2019s inception, it fancied itself, in Fiedler\u2019s words, \u201can escape from culture and a renewal of youth,\u201d a \u201cworld without a significant history or a substantial past,\u201d a realm that would \u201cplay out the imaginary childhood of Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is no surprise that an avowedly juvenile country would produce an avowedly juvenile fiction. Many of our classics, like \u201cHuckleberry Finn,\u201d are about<\/em> children, and many more masquerade as adventures for<\/em> children: the \u201cLeatherstocking Tales\u201d of James Fenimore Cooper, the haunted offerings of Edgar Allan Poe, even the magisterial \u201cMoby-Dick,\u201d 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\u2014men 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. \u201cOur fiction is essentially and at its best nonrealistic, even anti-realistic,\u201d Fiedler writes.<\/p>\n

A world without a past\u2014a world of eternal infancy\u2014must be a world without sex, and in Fiedler\u2019s 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 \u201cMadame Bovary,\u201d from 1856, and \u201cEffi Briest,\u201d 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 \u201ccame of the kind of people who copulate in the dark and live out their lives without ever seeing their sexual partners nude.\u201d Dreiser\u2019s subject was not lust but the \u201cconsequences of seduction,\u201d his tone not erotic but didactic. In his work, women were still ethereal innocents who had yet to become believable human beings.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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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\u2014or, better yet, by premature death. Little Eva, the cloyingly saintly child in Harriet Beecher Stowe\u2019s \u201cUncle Tom\u2019s Cabin\u201d (1851-52), succumbs to an illness and is thereby rescued from the prospect of adult sexuality. \u201cThere lies before the Little Evas of the world no course of action that would not sully them,\u201d Fiedler observes. Even if they wed, as upstanding women must, they will be \u201ctinged no matter how slightly with the stain of sexuality.\u2019\u2019 This logic reaches its natural conclusion in the work of Edgar Allan Poe, in which necrophiliac imagery abounds. \u201cThe only safe woman,\u201d Fiedler writes mordantly, \u201cis a dead woman.\u201d Even authors who refrained from killing off their female characters may as well have, for all the complexity their stick figures attained.<\/p>\n

Many writers did not even attempt to depict anyone but men, and Fiedler notes that many of the greatest American books stage retreats from \u201cthe world of women to the haunts of womanless men.\u201d On the Pequod in \u201cMoby-Dick\u201d and the raft in \u201cHuckleberry Finn,\u201d there is room for a \u201cpure marriage of males\u2014sexless and holy, a kind of counter-matrimony.\u201d 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\u2014the killing of the whales in \u201cMoby-Dick,\u201d the tarring and feathering of a pair of ruffians in \u201cHuckleberry Finn.\u201d<\/p>\n

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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 \u201cwith the super-ego,\u201d with the restrictive customs of a dying culture, the American gothic \u201cidentified evil with the id,\u201d with suppressed lusts. In 1960, summarizing \u201cLove and Death\u201d in a review, Trilling wrote that American writers \u201cconceived 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,\u201d in the outer wilderness that represents and reflects the wilderness within.<\/p>\n

Some of Fiedler\u2019s readings are irresistible: the homoerotic subtexts in \u201cMoby-Dick\u201d 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\u2019s heroines, surely among the most extraordinary female characters in literary history, really one-dimensional idols? Is the subject of \u201cLolita,\u201d a book that pays painstaking attention to its eponym\u2019s desperation, really \u201cthe seduction of a middle-aged man by a twelve-year-old girl\u201d? And, while we\u2019re at it, is \u201cMoby-Dick\u201d really a children\u2019s book in any respect? And doesn\u2019t James Baldwin\u2019s \u201cGiovanni\u2019s Room,\u201d published in 1956, four years before Fiedler\u2019s study, grapple directly with queer sexuality?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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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\u2014that is, it would have to be tedious. Fiedler is capable of aggravating us but not of boring us. What makes \u201cLove and Death\u201d so worth reading is also what makes it so worth disagreeing with.<\/p>\n

Several of its omissions are galling indeed. In a 1960 review in The New Republic<\/em>, Howe wrote that the book \u201crides a one-track thesis about American literature\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. never relenting into doubt by qualification, and simply ignoring those writers and books that might call the thesis into question.\u201d 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\u2014and, worse, he often declines to discuss writers who bear directly on the themes and tropes he is examining.<\/p>\n

He is very good on the ways in which male writers have flattened and fetishized women in American fiction\u2014and 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cLove and Death\u201d was not the only work in which Fiedler went too far. In 1970, he published \u201cCross the Border\u2014Close the Gap,\u201d 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 \u201ckeep up\u201d explains the irrelevance of his later work, so desperately modern that it now seems irretrievably dated. \u201cThe traditional novel is dead\u2014not dying, dead,\u201d 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 \u201cLove and Death\u201d).<\/p>\n

Still, what matters most is not whether Fiedler\u2019s work is unimpeachably scholarly but whether it is fun<\/em>, which \u201cLove and Death\u201d most certainly is, even and especially when it is also maddening. By Fiedler\u2019s own admission, it is a book that is \u201ctrying to become itself as wildly Gothic, as full of grotesque jokes as, say, \u2018Moby-Dick\u2019 or \u2018Huckleberry Finn.\u2019\u00a0\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In the years since \u201cLove and Death\u201d first appeared, the social pressures that produced America\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Still, there is something fundamentally canny about Fiedler\u2019s remark that \u201cit is maturity above all things that the American writer fears.\u201d 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\u2019s best gothic books), and in addition to the widespread phenomenon of middle-aged \u201cHarry Potter\u201d fandom, there is a glut of media for and about teen-agers: the television shows \u201cEuphoria,\u201d \u201cThe Summer I Turned Pretty,\u201d and \u201cStranger Things,\u201d the movies \u201cBooksmart\u201d and \u201cLadybird.\u201d One of the biggest box-office smashes of recent years, \u201cBarbie,\u201d 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; \u201cThe Super Mario Bros. Movie,\u201d which came out in 2023, is based on a children\u2019s video game.<\/p>\n

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, \u201cnot to be touched.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Unreal. Unreal. Unreal.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2014between the dream of outpacing the past and the reality of colonial violence\u2014animates such masterpieces as \u201cHuckleberry Finn\u201d and \u201cMoby-Dick.\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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More recent novels, such as Toni Morrison\u2019s \u201cThe Bluest Eye,\u201d from 1970, about a Black child who longs for blue eyes and the whiteness they represent, and David Foster Wallace\u2019s \u201cInfinite Jest,\u201d from 1996, about a precocious student at an \u00e9lite 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\u2014the protagonist of Emma Cline\u2019s \u201cThe Girls,\u201d from 2016, is fourteen, and Ben Lerner\u2019s \u201cTopeka School,\u201d from 2019, is in part about a high-school debate team\u2014but it is perhaps above all our literary sensibility, as opposed to our subject matter, that remains underaged. After all, since Fiedler completed \u201cLove and Death,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s \u201cTaipei,\u201d from 2013, and Lauren Oyler\u2019s \u201cFake Accounts,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Some novels in the autofictional tradition are snide and jejune; others, such as Lerner\u2019s \u201cLeaving the Atocha Station,\u201d from 2011, and Sheila Heti\u2019s \u201cHow Should a Person Be?,\u201d 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\u2014now that we, too, occupy an uncomfortable interregnum between two social formations\u2014we will find it in ourselves to put away childish things and write something new.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more Jack Schlossberg Makes His Case<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Becca Rothfeld on the literary critic Leslie Fiedler\u2019s classic study of American fiction between 1789 and 1959, which was originally published in 1960 and was reissued by New York Review Books this year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":386,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books"],"yoast_head":"\nWhy the American Novel Refused to Grow Up - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=387\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why the American Novel Refused to Grow Up - 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