Leslie Fiedler is, of course, better known as a critic than as a writer of fiction, and criticism has in fact been the more congenial medium for the exercise of his most engaging qualities of fictional invention. He is preeminently a novelist of ideas, using fiction to illustrate the ideas with a cartoon-like simplicity and, sometimes, vividness. The four volumes of fiction he published in the early and mid-1960's deal with the social, cultural and political issues that characteristically occupied intellectuals, and particularly Jewish intellectuals, during that period. Now, after a hiatus of eight years, Fiedler has written a new novel ["The Messengers Will Come No More"], once again reflecting the current preoccupation of the American "adversary culture"—which, now on the other side of the period of political activism and campus unrest, are very different from the questions that concerned Fiedler and his ambience a decade ago.
"The Messengers Will Come No More" might be described as a past-and-future fiction. It is set in the 25th century, on the site of ancient Palestine….
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