Leslie Fiedler takes his title [No! In Thunder] from a comment Melville made about Hawthorne: "There is the grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne. He says No! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say Yes. For all men who say yes, lie; and all men who say no,—why, they are the travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but a carpetbag—that is to say, the Ego."

That is a stirring declaration, and probably it is true of the greatest art. It is true of Donne's best love poems, of Flaubert's Emma Bovary, Conrad's "Nostromo," Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury," or Camus's "The Stranger." No flicker of affirmation is allowed, except the ironic one that comes of itself after the worst has been confronted….

One side of Fiedler's mind seems honestly drawn to Melville's commitment to "No! in thunder." The other side is satisfied only when he can show he's the sharpest and wittiest guy in class. "I'm Oliver Cool, the cleverest boy in school." Fiedler has a good eye for pretense, he can worry an idea like a cat toying with a mouse, but he has a terrible need to be a show-off.

The various Fiedlers appear to write in different tones. The treatment of Warren is quite deferential until near the end, that of Faulkner is patronizing, and the article on Kingsley Amis and his contemporaries is fairly sober and well considered. One is never sure what the tone is going to be. But one is never surprised to see Fiedler sitting astride his subject, pressing its nose in the dirt, and saying grimly and gleefully, "Say Uncle!" (p. 46)

[Fiedler] does not write in either the historical-method manner of the older scholars or the analytical method of the New Critics. He is what undergraduates often call the "Partisan Review type writer." His subject is Culture, popular culture, shifts in culture, and high art. He is as likely to refer to Marlon Brando or Al Capone as to Guido Cavalcanti or William Blake.

Fiedler's vocabulary is Partisan Reviewish:

The holiest Ikon of the Cult of the Child, of the Dream of Innocence in its pristine Anglo-Saxon form, is the Good Good Girl, the blonde asexual of nursery or orphanage, reincarnated from Little Nell to Mary Pickford.

                                           (pp. 46-7)

Even more tiresome than this constant mythicizing of heterosexuality is the preoccupation with homosexuality. Everyone who has seen certain Broadway plays, read certain poets or novelists, recognizes the homosexual cast of thought, and the strange distortions of motive and sympathy it invites. But Fiedler not only mentions it frequently, he gives it the Vocabulary Treatment: "Their pre-adolescent protagonists confront still the decaying plantation house, the miasma laden swamp, the secret lives of the Negro. Like the circus freaks, the deaf and dumb, the idiots also congenial to their authors, they project the invert's exclusion from the family, his sense of heterosexual passion as a threat and an offense; and this awareness is easily translated into the child's bafflement before weddings or honeymoons or copulation itself." What is self-evident to begin with does not seem any clearer because of the "symbols of exclusion" pitch.

In the introductory essay, explaining his title, Fiedler asks that the writer give a "Hard No" to whatever is too easy, too simply affirmative, and too easily "knowing." One wonders what sort of essay he might write, if in the fashion of George Orwell, he gave his own essays a "Hard No" going over. If there really are two Leslie Fiedlers, the one that controls the Vocabulary ought to make like an anchorite on the Mohave and let the other Fiedler do the writing. (p. 47)