In Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, perhaps her finest book, Mary McCarthy describes her youthful hopes for a career in an interesting way. Her ambition was literary, she says, but she does not put it as a yearning to become any one of the things she so notably has become: a novelist, a travel writer, a critical journalist of drama, literature, and public events; she wanted to be "a professional writer." Most people would call her a novelist, I suppose, but fewer than half of her 17 published books are works of fiction, and her latest, Cannibals and Missionaries, encourages the suspicion that she is best considered not as a novelist but as a professional writer who writes a novel from time to time—since the early 1950s, in fact, at steady intervals of eight years.

The earlier fiction had an obviously close relation to her own experience in...