In writing about a book by Kay Boyle, who is one of the shrewdest stylists in the language and something of a mystic no matter what material she makes momentary use of, one has to consider several things simultaneously, such as: what she is presenting and what she is suggesting, what she is saying and what music she is making, and how she is doing all of this inside an arbitrary plot-circle. The best thing she does is to transform the mundane detail and wring some spiritual essence from it; quite literally she can make (at her best) silk purses out of sows' ears, and you watch her writing as you would some marvelously deft machine performing this miracle, holding some scene or some person still while she outlines in space the nature of its, or his, meaning. And even when the miracle doesn't come off—as it...