Birds of America

"The heart of [the book] is a long letter from Peter to his mother, balancing off esthetics against morals, aristocracy against democracy. Peter's mother is the elite, but the law must be for the common; and as Peter vows to reject Rosamund we hear echoes of the inner debate Mary McCarthy has been suffering through for years: how to admire the loathsome virtuous; how to condemn the beautiful unregenerate...No creature more devoid of existential reality ever lived than this so-carefully-documented Peter Lefi...These are all ways of saying that Mary McCarthy, for all her cold eye and fine prose, is an essayist, not a novelist. But then, if we can have nonfiction novels, why not a new McCarthy genre, the ficitonal essay? It is not an unworthy form, taken for what it is.McCarthy, Mary is the author of 'Birds of America' with ISBN 9780156126304 and ISBN 0156126303.