The Worth of Venice

Venice Observed, by Mary McCarthy. 199 pp. Illustrated. New York: Reynal and Company. $15.00

Another book about Venice may seem, in-advance, a little like the time Horowitz played his arrangement of Liszt’s arrangement of Saint-Saen’s arrangement of the Danse Macabre: at best, a virtuoso stunt; at worst, intolerable. But Mary McCarthy’s most conspicuous gift has always been a tireless, very agile capacity to generalize, to look at almost any group of particulars, no matter how commonplace or disparate, and see them from an altitude all her own, at which they assume a persuasive pattern. In Venice she has had an ideally various but contained subject.

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Robert Phelps

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Venice Observed, by Mary McCarthy. 199 pp. Illustrated. New York: Reynal and Company. $15.00

Another book about Venice may seem, in-advance, a little like the time Horowitz played his arrangement of Liszt’s arrangement of Saint-Saen’s arrangement of the Danse Macabre: at best, a virtuoso stunt; at worst, intolerable. But Mary McCarthy’s most conspicuous gift has always been a tireless, very agile capacity to generalize, to look at almost any group of particulars, no matter how commonplace or disparate, and see them from an altitude all her own, at which they assume a persuasive pattern. In Venice she has had an ideally various but contained subject.