[In a sense, The Truants] reads like a thoughtful novel—[Barrett] cannot separate Partisan Review and its sometimes overbearing contributors from the cultural and historical pressures of the period. As evidence, just when we are thoroughly hooked by his first-rate personality portraits, we see that Barrett is really after a lot bigger game than we had originally expected….

William Barrett now looks back upon [the] bold effort to link together the values of high art and revolution as by and large a self-willed illusion. Although he himself was a Marxist during his days on Partisan Review, he finds that he and his fellow editors never once questioned the inherent loss of liberty that would occur in art and thought if their beloved "socialism" ever came into being. They were self-hypnotized utopians "escaping for a while from the harshness of … practical reality," hence the title of his book, The...