I first encountered Mary McCarthy not through her novels or criticism but through her political reporting. A former editor recommended that I read “The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits” before covering Paul Manafort’s arraignment in 2017. (Were we ever so young?) I loved McCarthy’s witty cameos of malefactors—behold Maurice Stans, Nixon’s erstwhile Secretary of Commerce, “a silver-haired, sideburned super-accountant and magic fund-raiser, who gave a day-and-a-half-long demonstration of the athletics of evasion, showing himself very fit for a man of his age.” McCarthy’s sentences were like mousetraps, snapping shut on both visual information and something deeper, the kind of quintessence that fictional characters possess and that we often long for real people to have, too.

In January, 1970, The New Yorker published McCarthy’s “One Touch of Nature,” a tour-de-force essay that stretched across nineteen pages and was animated by a simple question: What happened to nature imagery in fiction? McCarthy contends that novels have drifted far from “when the skill of an author was felt to be demonstrated by his descriptive prowess”—Dickens’s London fogs, Melville’s Pacific. Now, she observes, “rivers, lakes, mountains, valleys” are thin on the literary ground.

The technical term for the piece—a loose, sprawling, associative freestyle, in which McCarthy seemingly wheels through as many proper nouns and pithy summaries as she can—is a “riff.” It spans movements (classicism, Romanticism, modernism), regions (Continental Europe, England, the U.S.), and art forms (painting, poetry, fiction). McCarthy aims to account for nature’s mutable presence across three centuries of Western cultural production. As she proceeds, grudges are revived: “What betrays the bad faith of Hemingway is the invariable intrusion of the social into a natural context.” Politicians are etherized: Joseph McCarthy’s vision of the outdoors is “doubtless based on a frozen-food locker.” Opinions are tossed in the manner of house keys. Zola is “the only Naturalist to have a real conception of Nature.”

A reader trusts this voice instinctively, charmed by its opaline assessments and zinging aperçus, forgiving a shortage of textual evidence because each claim feels spot-on. “The characteristic of truth for Tolstoy was its recognizability,” McCarthy submits. “The truth (compare Socrates) is what we have ‘always’ known.” Still, one can quibble. “The novel (unlike the tale) is a social medium,” she declares with perfect confidence. Twelve pages in, we’re told that, “at this point, a definition”—of nature—“is called for.” At this point?

Like novelistic interludes concerning pine forests, McCarthy’s breed of criticism feels endangered. The breezy authority, the absurd plenitude: these qualities suggest a more hospitable era for the printed word, even if you prefer today’s careful efficiency. That McCarthy rarely bothers to explain her voluminous references evokes a time when the writer’s job was less to make thinking easy than to make it rewarding. “One Touch of Nature” supplies the loveliness it praises, pausing to describe “the still, ribbony roads leading nowhere” in paintings by the Dutch artist Jacob van Ruisdael (whereas the essay itself is a snarl of colored lines on an M.T.A. map, leading everywhere at once) and “the snow in ‘The Dead’ falling softly over Ireland, a universal blanket or shroud.” As McCarthy surveys her subject, she conjures a living artistic ecosystem that is constantly evolving, including in its relationship to the natural world. The subtext is that this system, like the carbon-based one, is beautiful and worth attending to; McCarthy, novelist that she is, encrypts her themes on the way to elucidating them.

“One Touch of Nature” bursts with so much virtuosity and élan that you might forget it’s a whodunnit, out to solve the mystery of why organic scenery has gone missing from fiction. But, in the final paragraphs, McCarthy provides an answer. “Nature,” she writes, “is no longer the human home”—thanks to technology, which has become “the No. 1 opponent of human society.” This turn feels especially haunting in 2025, when much of contemporary life has migrated online and A.I.’s devastating environmental impact is only beginning. One wonders what McCarthy would make of our moment, in which runaway machines seem poised to further degrade both nature and art, alongside her own profession of literary criticism. Surely she’d have some choice words. ♦

The absence of plot from the modern novel is often commented on, but nobody has called attention to the disappearance of another element—as though nobody missed it.