[In the following review, Poore judges the stories of Cast a Cold Eye to be brilliant character sketches.]

Scott Fitzgerald's memorable observation on writing short stories—"begin with an individual, and before you know it you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created nothing"—comes frequently to mind as you read Mary McCarthy's new collection of rather remorselessly satiric tales, Cast a Cold Eye. Miss McCarthy will be remembered as that source of the southpaw intellectuals whose Utopian lampoon, The Oasis, drew blood all over the Marx-and-Kafka set, about a year ago. Also as the author of "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Suit," and other aspects of The Company She Keeps.

Also as the author of "Yonder Peasant, Who Is He?" a profoundly moving story of orphaned childhood, last encountered in that fine anthology, 55 Short Stories from The New Yorker, which appears again, we are happy to say, in Cast a Cold Eye, along with these stories: "The Weeds," "The Friend of the Family," "C. Y. E.," "The Blackguard," and "The Cicerone."

Since Miss McCarthy's types are devastating, it is natural enough to find that sometimes they scarcely seem to exist as individuals. Yet they're never quite devastated right off the face of the earth. You keep remembering their obsessions, even if you've forgotten what they look like.

You wish, for example, that the tormented wife in "The Weeds" who kept trying to get away from her husband could have encountered the sad-sack man-about-town in "The Friend of the Family" when she made her brief and characteristically feckless flight to New York.

Those two had a lot in common. The stories they appear in, though, have a more striking affinity. For while "The Weeds" is busy kicking the living daylights out of a marriage, "The Friend of the Family" has many a brutally unkind thing to say about people who live alone and do or do not like it.

You won't find many cheery moonbeams in Cast a Cold Eye, but you will see that there are brilliant sketches here by a brilliant writer. Even the young man in "The Old Men" has to stop and ask himself in the hospital: "Am I a monster?" And the desperately puzzled convent girl of "C. Y. E." felt she suffered from "a kind of miserable effluvium of the spirit that the ordinary sieves of report cards and weekly confessions had been powerless to catch."

Somehow, the ultimate point of "The Cicerone"—a story of Americans in Italy, than which there is nothing rifer in contemporary literature, led by Mr. Hemingway, right now—seems to apply widely to the people in this book: "The relation between pursuer and pursued had been confounded, by a dialectic too subtle for their eyes."