Reading Mary McCarthy's new novel, Cannibals and Missionaries, makes one worry about an apparent shortage of literary settings for novelists who trade in ideas, wit and observation of manners. Why else has McCarthy concocted a novel about an airliner hijacking?…

I can only assume that McCarthy adopted the hijacking device because she was pressed for a suitable fictional venue in which her shrewdly cast group of liberals, wealthy dilettantes and dedicated revolutionaries could perform. With these sharply drawn character types, articulate and representative in the case of the liberals, and devastatingly obtuse in the case of the rich, we might reasonably expect—given McCarthy's intelligence and political sophistication—a compelling symposium on a number of issues of our times, plus clashes of class and politics, respectively, between the liberals and the rich, and the liberals and the revolutionaries. In other words, ideas, talk, love, hate—people in the...