Time & Perspective Quote by Leslie Fiedler

A critic admitting he’s fallen out of love is always a small act of cultural treason, and Fiedler knows it. Pynchon is one of those writers you’re supposed to “graduate into” endlessly: the harder he gets, the more serious you must become. Fiedler flips that prestige logic. He starts with affection, then pivots to a measured disenchantment that reads like a refusal to confuse difficulty with value.

The key phrase is “didn’t really pay off.” That’s a consumerist metaphor smuggled into high literary judgment, and it’s doing real work. Fiedler isn’t whining that Pynchon got complicated; he’s charging that the complexity stopped producing returns: insight, emotional pressure, narrative electricity, the sense that the labyrinth has a center. “Denser and more complex” sketches a trajectory many postwar maximalists risk: the book becomes an ecosystem of references, systems, and paranoid linkages, and the reader’s labor becomes the point. Fiedler’s subtext is that the writer has started writing for the myth of Pynchon rather than for the page.

Context matters: Fiedler built a career challenging the gatekeeping pieties of American letters, arguing that “serious” fiction often denies the pleasures (plot, sensation, taboo) that actually move readers. So this isn’t just one man’s impatience. It’s a broader critique of a mid-to-late-20th-century critical economy where opacity accrues cultural capital, and where the reader is expected to convert confusion into admiration.

There’s also a quiet self-indictment: “I liked him… I liked him less…” Fiedler frames the problem as relational, not doctrinal. The disappointment lands like a verdict on a whole aesthetic bargain: if you demand more work, you’d better deliver more meaning.