Books, Arts & Manners: Mistress of Paradox

Occasional Prose, by Mary McCarthy (Harcourt, Brace, 341 pp., $17.95)

Mary McCarthy is the American Rebecca West. Both writers are lucid, intelligent, incisive; severe, irreverent, committed. Both have a steady moral seriousness and a wide range of interests, and are equally at home in art or history. Like Miss West, and also like most contemporary American novelists—Mailer, Baldwin, Updike, Vidal, Capote, Gass, Theroux, Oates—Miss McCarthy is better at nonfiction, which permits her to strengthen her work through the discipline of fact, while using novelistic techniques to describe character and setting.

About the Author

Jeffrey Meyers

Mr. Meyers is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the author of John Huston: Courage and Art.

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Occasional Prose, by Mary McCarthy (Harcourt, Brace, 341 pp., $17.95)

Mary McCarthy is the American Rebecca West. Both writers are lucid, intelligent, incisive; severe, irreverent, committed. Both have a steady moral seriousness and a wide range of interests, and are equally at home in art or history. Like Miss West, and also like most contemporary American novelists—Mailer, Baldwin, Updike, Vidal, Capote, Gass, Theroux, Oates—Miss McCarthy is better at nonfiction, which permits her to strengthen her work through the discipline of fact, while using novelistic techniques to describe character and setting.