Daily Inspiration Quote by Leslie Fiedler

The little hitch in Leslie Fiedler's syntax is the whole point: "One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like". It reads like a curmudgeon relaxing his guard for exactly one writer, and the studied plainness is a kind of criticism in miniature. Fiedler, a critic famous for big, often combative theses about American literature, drops the apparatus and gives you something closer to a verdict delivered over a kitchen table. That informality is strategic. It signals that McCarthy doesn't need to be defended by theory; he can be endorsed with the blunt confidence usually reserved for taste, not argument.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the literary scene Fiedler thought had become mannered, over-professionalized, or trapped in self-conscious cleverness. "To come along" frames McCarthy as an arrival, a late-breaking answer to a question Fiedler has been waiting to ask: Who still writes with elemental force? Then the second sentence pivots from chronology to appetite. "Him, I like" is oddly objectifying, almost like pointing: that one. It's also deliberately ungrammatical, a small anti-elitist gesture from an academic who knew exactly what proper diction looks like. The effect is to make pleasure sound like principle.

Context matters: Fiedler's career was built on challenging canon formation while still caring intensely about it. Praising McCarthy in this offhand way is canon-making with a shrug. It implies that even a critic skeptical of literary gatekeeping can still be surprised into allegiance by a novelist whose brutality, biblical cadence, and mythic Americana feel, to Fiedler, like the real thing.