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.”