The Snow Ball is a sort of prosy musical joke, though hardly like one by Mozart, with whom Brigid Brophy seems to be on close terms; Meyerbeer perhaps. The author begins with an epigraph from a book written by herself (Mozart the Dramatist): "That most fascinating subject for gossip, whether, when the opera opens, Don Giovanni has just seduced or has just failed to seduce Donna Anna will no doubt go on being debated for another two centuries." The novel provides an all-night debating ground….

[The plot of The Snow Ball] is chiefly a stage for the play of three ideas. When Don Giovanni asks Anna what she chiefly thinks about, she sums it up neatly: "Mozart, sex, and death." Considering the latter preoccupation, however, one wonders what to make of an observation by Don Giovanni a little later: "Obsessive thoughts about death are in inverse proportion to the frequency of sexual intercourse." For Brigid Brophy evidently puts a very high value upon sexual intercourse. Anna gazes at a statue of Cupid—described, oddly enough, with beady-eyed disgust—and offers "a prayer to the only god she believed in: but him she believed capable of saving the world." Like other ideas in this book, however, this estimate of the powers of Eros is stated, not demonstrated.

Peacock's novels shows how bracing can be the play of ideas among pantomime people; but such tours de force call not only for wit and style but a context of intellectual ferment. Miss Brophy is not particularly lucky in any of these respects. Her prose is a curious pastiches of magazinish naturalism and clogged baroque, studded with passages of apothegmatic dialogue ("… the rich have libraries, whereas people like us have books. People like to read books. The rich have them catalogued"). She has something in common with Iris Murdoch—pleasure in ideas, extravagance, an ambivalent attitude toward the physical end of life—but she is without the older, far better, writer's narrative skill. The intellectual jokes—often either banal or irritatingly illegible—take precedence over the interplay of personalities (the people are no more than rather ugly dolls); yet under the surface one senses the beat of a sentimental, vindictive female heart.