Word: fiedler
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...SECOND STONE (303 pp.)-Leslie A. Fiedler-Stein...
...about one thing: The Second Stone is indeed a first novel. After that, heaven help the reader if he tries to play it straight. For The Second Stone is booby-trapped at every turn of the narrative with tricky bits from the complicated and ingenious philosophical apparatus of Leslie Fiedler, who is a critic, scholar and professor of English at Montana State University...
...does Stone stone Stone? The unwary reader may think it is out of sheer petulance. But the real clue to this odd story is to be found not in the novel itself, but in Dr. Fiedler's critical writings-notably Love and Death in the American Novel. Read thus, The Second Stone offers some of the rarest pleasure of the year, combining the attractions of Scrabble, the double-crostic, literary name-spotting and one-upmanship with the humbler delights of the whodunit. This is a parable and the characters are crazy mythed-up people...
...Never the Twain." Clem is not just a defeated bum, but what Dr. Fiedler likes to call "the questing lover, surrogate for the artist . . . projected as a pariah, an Ishmael." He is linked in a love-hate relation with his nonidentical twin Mark...
Actually Clem and Mark are plainly intended to be stand-ins for one man- Mark Twain. According to a favorite Fiedler theory, the true rebel was the private Sam Clemens as opposed to the public entertainer Mark Twain. Never these twain will meet-or part. The Second Stone is a skillfully contrived dramatization of this dichotomy. Clem is the defiant Huck Finn who has "lit out for the frontier" with his big "no" to "the world of mothers." Mark is Tom Sawyer, the pseudo rebel "with a note in his pocket to Aunt Polly" saying he loves...