Aggressive, cocksure, intellectually sadistic, dogmatic, gossipy, and more keenly involved with contemporary America than probably any of his critical peers, Professor Leslie Fiedler … has written [Waiting for the End], a justly bitter book that withholds neither his derisive intelligence nor his superior independence. Misleadingly subtitled "a new work on the crisis in American culture, race and sex," and sub-subtitled "a portrait of 20th-century American literature and its writers," it is an incisively personal and unofficial mixture from both these Ph.D. lodes issuing in a single verdict: failure in American life and letters.
With a rare if boisterous courage inspired by his almost total pessimism, Mr. Fiedler faces realities that must cost him dearly as a fully committed teacher and novelist-critic who has given his most energetic years to a stance he now questions in the extreme. Passionately involved in prose literature, he now dispassionately foresees the increasing meaninglessness to society of the novel as an art form—one which he himself practices "ironically and desperately" and which from this book you can tell excites his fullest human response.
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