Brigid Brophy is not an English master builder. She constructs her novels on traditional patterns, then decorates them with bon mots and allusions. A visitor to one of her fanciful stage-sets treads on familiar ground: if the settings are often more brilliantly conveyed than the people who perform in them, the fault does not lie with her, since she is interested in appearances, not reality. Her eye focuses on the costumes and inflections people adopt in order to keep up their pretenses: the art of disguise—public and private, verbal and psychic, therapeutic and destructive—is the subject matter on which she trains her loaded camera. From this vantage point she develops comic negatives that are deadly, lucid and funny.

In the two novellas ["The Snow Ball" and "The Finishing Touch"] that make up her new book, she does not try to disguise her interest in masks. The...