Lady Flat on Her Back

The Company She Keeps by Mary McCarthy. Simon and Schuster. $2.50.

The author says her “novel in six parts” is about “a missing object … the ordinary, indispensable self that has somehow got mislaid.” This is the asserted structure, but the syntax of the parts is so tenuous that it seems quite proper for the young lady who focusses each part to end up “flat on her back in a psychoanalyst’s office.” Miss McCarthy says: “If the reader is moved to ask: ‘Can all this be the same person?’ why, that is the question that both the heroine and the author are up against.” This only anticipates the objection. The heroine finds that she cannot separate her “self” from the company she keeps, and in each part it is only the company who gets any identity. The young lady is sometimes a perspective but never an object, so the book for us is a chronicle of what Mr. Tate calls “abstract experience.”