Satire, so one tends to assume, is what results when a person with a sure hold on his values decides to mock a world which outrages those values at every important turn. A conscious perspective is supposedly all-important: the satirist, by implication, must have his clear view of utopia, a private vision of perfection guaranteed to impart gusto and savagery to the assault on the knaveries of the comic villain or the shortcomings of the bumbler who is a veritable caricature of all bumblers.
Such assumptions and definitions are all very well, but what is one to do when they fail to net the fish? The case of Mary McCarthy offers a piquant commentary on the conventional thinking about satire. For here we have a young woman (one will always think of her as young as long as she retains her engaging insouciance and her killer instinct) who has written five satirical novels and a collection of shorter fictional essays in controlled malice without any conscious recognition of the disparity between her professed beliefs and the actual touchstones that give point to her ironies. Three of the novels—The Company She Keeps, The Oasis, The Groves of Academe—are first-rate in their candid and witty exposure of types of fashionable radicals; and the shorter fictions (see the purely fictional first half of Cast a Cold Eye) have the merit of sustained mood pieces carried out with a cauterizing detachment. Her new novel, The Group (Harcourt, $5.95) which is her most ambitious work, sometimes deserts satire for a straight
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