Wish I'd written it
Here's Laura Jacobs in Vanity Fair, writing about the novelist Mary McCarthy's scandalous 1963 novel, The Group:
Setting aside the fact that McCarthy could be quite theatrical when reading her work before an audience, there is a distinctly narrated, documentary-voice-over quality to her fiction, as if her tales came straight from her head-eyes, ears, brain, mouth-without ever having traveled through her heart. (emphasis mine.)
That's not a put-down. That's the verbal equivalent of a Mob hit.
Setting aside the fact that McCarthy could be quite theatrical when reading her work before an audience, there is a distinctly narrated, documentary-voice-over quality to her fiction, as if her tales came straight from her head-eyes, ears, brain, mouth-without ever having traveled through her heart. (emphasis mine.)
That's not a put-down. That's the verbal equivalent of a Mob hit.