[One] cannot help suspecting that The Truants was originally conceived on a more modest scale—a memoir in the form of portraits—than what it finally became: a tantalizingly suggestive, but thinly realized attempt to draw, from the exhaustion of Marxism and modernism as they played themselves out in the story of Partisan Review, a far-reaching polemical lesson about the imperative need for a new moral and religious consciousness in our time. The issues he raises are indisputably important, but in this anecdotal context of recollection Barrett fails to do them justice.

There remains a nagging question: what can these memories of the Partisan Review intellectuals mean to those who were never part of that passionate, noisy, incestuous little world? It was, Barrett remembers, "as closed and inbred as a conventicle of monks," and elsewhere, in an ethnically more exact image, he speaks of the ghetto-like mentality of...