SOURCE: "The Novels of Mary McCarthy," in Fiction as Wisdom: From Goethe to Bellow, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980, pp. 156-89.

In the following excerpt, Stock discusses the themes of the novella The Oasis.

McCarthy has defended The Oasis (1949) from the charge that it is not a novel by insisting that it was not intended to be, that it is a conte philosophique. This explains its lack of action, for instead of plot we have slight episodes explored for their large meanings and characters revealed less by what they do than in long satirical descriptions. But it cannot eliminate the sense that the tale's developments, which ought after all to arise by an inner necessity, are sometimes arbitrarily asserted, as if to get things moving. And yet the reminder of an elegant eighteenth-century prose form does point to qualities that will keep the tale, in spite of its...