McCarthy, Mary (Vol. 5) - McCarthy, Mary 1912–
McCarthy, Mary 1912–
An American novelist, essayist, short story writer, and critic, Ms McCarthy is known for her social and political criticism as well as for her popular novels The Group and Birds of America. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 5-8, rev. ed.)
Though hardly an allegorist, Mary McCarthy is one example of what I mean by the academic novelist. An abrasive critical intelligence and a formidably incisive prose writer, Miss McCarthy has not written a first-rate novel. Mainly she has not because she is unable (or unwilling) to create characters capable of defying their maker. They are not quite like some of Robert Penn Warren's, embodied abstractions; but for all their simulation of a kind of life, they are not quite human beings either; they are artifacts of real people. Miss McCarthy holds them up to the fluoroscope of her critical intelligence and finds them sterile and absurd, mean and pretentious, deceitful...
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