Miss Mary McCarthy, whose disenchantment is private as well as cosmic, offers these Theatre Chronicles [in Sights and Spectacles] … with a bleak and remote indifference. Positively, they do not give her pleasure: if they possess any value, it is chiefly as "a report to a minority by one of their number from a front that was very distant, almost exotic." She sees in them, quintessentially, a blend of person and place. Nor, from the lucid plateau of middle life, does Miss McCarthy look upon this early person with favor: coolly she laments her ready tone of cockiness and unsupported hauteur. Without flinching, she exposes the particular egotism of the whole enterprise: "The notion that abstract reasoning can crush a fact (e.g., a successful play, a political phenomenon), a wholly unMarxist notion, was nonetheless the principle on which most of our criticism was practiced…. I felt myself at...