Mary McCarthy has a remarkable insight into the weaknesses of others. This is not a clumsy wisecrack but a simple statement of a simple fact. Give her a book or a play or an acquaintance to fictionalize and she spots with unerring accuracy a cloven hoof, an Achilles heel, or a fly in the ointment. And, as the play reviews in her book "Sights and Spectacles" long ago demonstrated (some were written as far back as 1937), her diagnoses are usually sound as far as they go. The fault she has to find is nearly always there. What she says is nearly always true even though it is often only the harshest part of the truth.

Unlike other notable hatchet-women (Dorothy Parker for instance), Miss McCarthy is not a Sophisticate but an Intellectual…. [Though] time and circumstance cast her in with the young radicals for whom Marxian criticism of...