Books: The Annotated Fig Leaf

LOVE AND DEATH IN THE AMERICAN NOVEL (603 pp.)—Leslie A. Fiedler—Criterion ($8.50).

Leslie A. Fiedler, literary critic and professor of English at Montana State University, describes the friendship of Ishmael and Queequeg in Moby Dick as "homoerotic"—a case of "innocent homosexuality." Written in that vein, Love and Death in the American Novel is a tumid, quasi-psychoanalytic study in which Critic Fiedler tries to strip American literature down to a heavily annotated fig leaf. As Fiedler sees it, the fig leaf conceals guilt and impotence, the historical inability of the U.S. novelist to portray...