Ideas and the Novel

In this eye-opening book, Mary McCarthy shares her love of the novel and her fear that it is becoming an endangered literary species

"He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it."

So begins Mary McCarthy's fascinating critical analysis of the novel (and its practitioners) from her double-edged perspective as both reader and writer. The bestselling author of The Group takes T. S. Eliot's quote about Henry James, written in 1918, as a jumping-off point to discuss how the novel has evol...