Ideas and the Novel reads like notes for an angry letter, the kind banged out after a feverish night, the kind full of arguments that sound brilliant when tossing on the pillow but frenzied when read with a little distance. One senses some gadfly biting Mary McCarthy's haunches…. But the author doesn't name the pest. We're not supposed to notice it, I guess.

McCarthy begins with an attack on Henry James and Virginia Woolf for damning the Victorians and ushering in the art novel. According to McCarthy, James and Woolf pinched the form more than they freed it. They added emotion and sex as subject matter, but purged the novel of thought—of talk about morality and politics. Thus, McCarthy says, the novel lost its authority to comment on society, lost its eclecticism and capaciousness.

McCarthy would say the novel lost its balls, if she talked this way...