The Group

by Mary McCarthy

Paperback, 1992

Status

Available

Call number

813.52

Genres

General Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Collection

Your library

Publication

Penguin Books Ltd (1992), Edition: New Ed, Paperback, 352 pages

Description

Fiction. HTML:This smash bestseller about privileged Vassar classmates shocked America in the sixties and remains "juicy . . . witty . . . brilliant" (Cosmopolitan). At Vassar, they were known as "the group"�??eight young women of privilege, the closest of friends, an eclectic mix of vibrant personalities. A week after graduation in 1933, they all gather for the wedding of Kay Strong, one of their own, before going their separate ways in the world. In the years that follow, they will each know accomplishment and loss in equal measure, pursuing careers and marriage, experiencing the joys and traumas of sexual awakening and motherhood, all while suffering through betrayals, infidelities, and sometimes madness. Some of them will drift apart. Some will play important roles in the personal dramas of others. But it is tragedy that will ultimately unite the group once again. A novel that stunned the world when it was first published in 1963, Mary McCarthy's The Group found acclaim, controversy, and a place atop the New York Times bestseller list for nearly two years for its frank and controversial exploration of women's issues, social concerns, and sexuality. A blistering satire of the mores of an emergent generation of women, The Group is McCarthy's enduring masterpiece, still as relevant, powerful, and wonderfully entertaining fifty years on. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author's esta… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member kraaivrouw

Reading this book is like drinking a very dry gin martini (shaken, not stirred). Closely observed, carefully described, always acerbic - this was a real pleasure.

I remember skimming through this at my Seattle grandmother's house when I was in high school. At that point I was mostly shocked that

someone had written so frankly about sex during the 1930's ("They had SEX in the 1930's? Really?") - teenagers are always a bit surprised to discover a whole world out there that is outside of their own experience. I tucked the book away in the back of my mind as something I should read at some point. I am currently reading books that were published in my birth year and this was the first. If it is any evidence of the quality of writing in 1963 then it was a great year for more than just me! I was completely floored by how wonderful this book was.

Written almost more as a series of short stories about the women in the group, the stories are tied together by Vassar, a wedding (at the beginning), and a funeral (at the end). In between are stories I will never forget. A Particular standout for me is Chapter 2, wherein Dottie loses her virginity. Ms. McCarthy truly captures the universal awkwardness of this event along with its own attendant pleasant surprises and does so in effortless intelligent prose. I loved one of the minor characters, Noreen Schmittlapp - utterly contemptible in some ways and yet so admirable in her ability to flaunt convention - she's a gorgeous counterpoint to some of the other more downtrodden and conventional characters.

This book makes me grateful that I was born during the era of Our Bodies, Ourselves instead of relying on Kraft-Ebbing for my education on human sexuality. I am glad that I have more choices than these women did (What the hell did they get such great educations for, anyway, if all that was on offer was to keep house? Better cocktail party conversation?). I am glad that I can't be institutionalized for objecting to a spouse's affairs and physical abuse (at least not easily).

I was just as struck, however, by the way some things endure - watch any one of the dozens of bridal shows on television right now and boggle along with me at the notion that this is a woman's only day, the most important dress she'll ever spend too much money on, the ne plus ultra of life - the more things change, the more they stay same (factoring in inflation, of course).

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LibraryThing member thorold

The premise of The Group isn't very promising, on the face of it: an account of a bunch of overprivileged American young women (Vassar Class of '33) making the transition from student life to adulthood in New York City. It's the plot of every romantic comedy, and Virago have made sure you don't

miss the point by commissioning the author of Sex and the city to write the introduction.

Except that - of course - whilst McCarthy draws heavily on the imagery, set-piece scenes and language of romantic comedy as well as its plot conventions (even to the extent of having a chapter written from the POV of an English Butler in an obvious Wodehouse-pastiche), there is no way that anyone could possibly mistake this for a conventional romantic comedy. A few pages into the book we are dropped into a detailed and decidedly unerotic description of a young woman's first experience of sexual intercourse, making it abundantly clear to the reader that we are as far away from Lady Chatterley as we are from Jill the reckless. And in case we might still have any delusions about that, we then get a whole chapter on the diaphragm. Later on in the book, McCarthy takes on other sensitive topics, including domestic violence, breast-feeding, rival theories of baby-care, the abuses of psychiatric medicine, Lesbianism (still determinedly large-L in McCarthy's day), and burial practices. This was all written at a time when battles over literary censorship were still raging in most English-speaking countries, and publishers were far from sure that you could get away with talking about such things in print (but they were always willing to try, knowing that controversial books sell like hot cakes...).

There's clearly a roman à clef aspect as well, since she draws quite heavily on her own life for subject-matter (even to the extent of giving one of the most unsympathetic characters the name and occupation of her own first husband...). And McCarthy makes no attempt to hide her left-wing political views, although she does poke a bit of fun at her former Trotskyist affiliation.

The fact that a book broke taboos in 1963 doesn't necessarily make it worth reading now. So what else does McCarthy have to offer? I got a lot of pleasure from her very precise, ironic use of language. She is constantly subverting the idiom of romance by slipping in some ostensibly harmless expression that actually turns the sense of the whole passage on its head. There are hundreds of examples in the text: one that particularly struck me is the scene where the horrible Harald has committed his perfectly sane wife to a mental hospital and spends the day wandering aimlessly around the city thinking about the enormity of what he's just done. Amongst other things, he visits the zoo and looks at "his ancestors, the apes". In context, you hardly notice it going past, but when you've read that you know exactly what to think of Harald and you're not in the least surprised that his conscience does not win out over his desire to get his wife out of the way. Maybe that sort of thing is more a columnist's trick than a building block for a big literary structure, but it does make sure you keep on reading attentively.

The other reason for reading the book today, and probably the important one, is for what it tells us about the way the dominant ideology defines roles for women. The characters in the book have been brought up to see themselves as the crème de la crème (to borrow a phrase from another fifties book about women in the thirties) of the coming generation in America. They have completed an education that should qualify them to go anywhere and do anything, and most of them have the kind of dynastic support and financial resources that ought to mean no door is closed to them. Some of them are the daughters of women who were prominent in the struggle for women's education and the vote. Most have left college with the idea of changing the world (as we all do...), yet by the end of the book, none of them seems to have retained enough belief in herself to achieve anything professionally: sooner or later they all end up measuring success or failure in terms of husbands, babies, furniture and designer clothes. The corollary of this should presumably be "if they can't manage it, what hope is there for working-class women?" - but it isn't really very evident from the book that any of the characters, or even the author, is really aware that working-class women exist (except for faintly comic black maidservants, and they seem to become invisible when off duty too). So I suspect that we might just be reading that into it.

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LibraryThing member AlanWPowers

I read this book over forty years ago, living in a room Mary McCarthy may have stayed in, since she visited the house of her Vassar '33 classmate, Rhoda Wheeler (Sheehan). Rhoda, a German major in college, had seen Hitler after curfew in Berlin, in his car. Rhoda was my colleague at Bristol

Community College in Fall River, MA, where she brought her other famous author friend to read several years in a row in the late 70s, Eiizabeth Bishop, back from Brazil and after her Brazilian friend died. Her poem about that loss, "The art of losing isn't hard to master," was completed in Rhoda's Hurricane House, where I interviewed Bishop on prosody. A few years later, I also cleaned a fish--a bluefish--for the author of "The Fish."
When I read The Group, I read it pretty certain that I knew who the compulsive reader character was, and the one who traveled around the world. So I read it with other than strictly literary interest, though after forty years I only recall a skilled narrative balancing the five principle characters, and including dramatic scenes such as the loss of virginity.
I believe it was unprecedented as a novel, the first feminist novel in prioritizing women themselves, with relationships secondary. Italian feminist novels have done similarly, but more recently, in the last twenty years. And they are more grim, as is the sexist situation they find themselves in.

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LibraryThing member ghneumann

Stories about female friendships and how they grow and change over time and through life experiences are catnip to me. Mary McCarthy's The Group follows eight young women who graduate from Vassar in 1933 and the course their lives take over the next seven years. The novel kicks off with the rather

impulsive wedding of one of their number, Kay, to her long-distance and mysterious boyfriend Harald almost immediately after graduation. Kay's marriage (and its deterioration) make up the most coherent through-line of the story, which follows the members of the group one at a time as they make their way in the world (the world being 1930's New York for the most part) and continue to be involved in each other's lives. McCarthy's writing is sharp and insightful, and the characters she writes feel very real...all of them are self-deluding to some extent and McCarthy lets you "watch" them do it through her narration of their lives.

What struck me as I read this book, which was apparently enormously popular when it was published in the 60s, was how even though it was written 50 years ago and takes place another 30 years before that, it was so modern in many ways. Sure, some of the references are pretty dated, but the challenges these women face are largely similar to the ones we're continuing to face today: the difference between sex and love (and wanting the former to mean the latter even when you know it doesn't), dead-end relationships, sexism in the workplace, sexuality, marriage, raising kids. There's a character, Priss, who has a child and is struggling with the decision of whether to breast feed or bottle feed and the way she feels like she's doing it wrong depending on who's she's talking to. The Mommy Wars feel very current and endemic to the current social media-laden climate, but this book makes it obvious that it goes back waaay further than that. It's easy to feel like the stuff your generation is facing is new and different than the things that previous generations struggled with, but it's really much more similar than you might think. Plus ca change and all that.

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LibraryThing member TheAmpersand

Ouch! This one has not aged well at all. McCarthy follows a group of eight Vassar friends through their early adulthood. I can see why this book might have been something of a sensation in its day: the characters discuss sex, relationships and birth control forthrightly, and it's obvious that

McCarthy wants to tell her curious readers all about the life that awaits modern working women after graduation. Still, her attempt at social realism is badly undercut by, among other things, the large amount of soap opera schmaltz that she throws into the mix. She has a bad habit of describing her characters by telling and not showing; some of her descriptions wouldn't be out of place in the captions to a Vogue fashion spread. McCarthy seems to do better when she gives her characters a bit more room to develop. A couple of her characters, such as Polly Andrews, a nurse, or Libby MacAusland, who wants to work in publishing, evolve into well-rounded protagonists, but, in this case, eight is probably too much. I suspect that "The Group" might have worked better if its membership had been cut in half. Also, while one hears a lot about "male" and "female" writing these days, McCarthy's prose strikes me as "female" in a particularly uncomplimentary way. Gossipy, prim, and condescending in more or less equal measure, McCarthy succeeds in making her college gals sound shallower and less intelligent than she probably intended.

There are other problems here, too. While the blood at the Seven Sisters probably ran a bit bluer in the thirties than it did today, every member of the titular group seems to be wealthy, fashionable, and pretty. It's a pleasant-enough fantasy, sure, but it makes it difficult for this reader to take these characters, and the author who created them, very seriously. "The Group" suffers from an early version of what we might call the "Sex in the City" problem: McCarthy can't seem to decide whether she's critiquing her characters' privileged upbringings and social presumption or celebrating them. Too often, I feel it's the latter; the book is riddled with brand names, upper-class signifiers and loving descriptions of luxury goods. At the same time, she seems to vaguely resent her characters' presumably insincere dabbling in leftist politics, proving, perhaps, that some social grudges seem to seem to endure down through the generations. Heck, add a few tattoos, vegan tacos, and fixie bikes and "The Group" could tell the story of contemporary Brooklyn hipsters. I hope I haven't just given some aspiring writer an idea; I doubt very much that a Williamsburg version of "The Group" would be any better than McCarthy's original. Readers who don't go all soft when handsome young doctors propose marriage to their put-upon nurses are encouraged to skip this particular product of its time.

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LibraryThing member gregorybrown

After tearing through Mary McCarthy's The Group, I'm kinda shocked that it hasn't been inducted into the canon yet. The book is a stunning, scary look at gender relations in the 1930s, yet so searing that it's a shock to see it was written in the 1950s. Even Mad Men, written from the perspective of

today's improvements, isn't as damning as McCarthy can be about the oppression of the time.

McCarthy gets quite a bit out of the tension between characters being comedically wrong and worryingly wrong. And that's putting it lightly; some of the dialogue can be absolutely chilling, especially the prisoners who have learned to love their prison. Each of the characters seems promising and aware of their times, until they incidentally slip into some pattern of behavior that perpetuates the oppression of women at the time.

As far as those patterns of behavior, McCarthy has wonderful treatments of internal dialogues and how women at the time sort of reasoned their way through the world. More than their actions, it shows the assumptions and prejudices they worked under, and the rationalizations that justified horrible results for themselves. There's also a tremendous insecurity from the expectations of the day, primarily marriage.

So many of the dialogues would start with the character considering something and, like pulling on a sweater's thread, slowly unraveling what they thought they knew. Sometimes it's accurate, but most of the time you get the sense that they're just running around in circles missing some central lacuna. And so many of the dialogues pulled from the pop-psychology of the day, primarily Freud's. It's hard to imagine today how large his impact was, but at the time it rivaled Darwin's (and possibly exceeded).

Sometimes McCarthy steps back and looks at things from an incidental character's point of view, showing how these young women are perceived—and in that perception, constrained—by men and older women. There are yet other episodes that show the fruitless of their analysis and pop-psychology by upturning one character's inferences using the experience of another. in one memorable case, she has one character remember a party that was already described matter-of-factly, except this character's rememberance is overtaken by a single, surprising urge.

I was surprised by how much the novel was also focused on class: how it in some senses liberated the women of the novel to worry less about material needs, but at the same time gave them more to lose if they worked against the social order. It's hard to say whether class lended itself to more or less equitable relations—I'd guess more because these women had access to education, but it's hard to tell given the shared social background of most characters. It would certainly vary dramatically by region though, with women in East Texas not yet receiving electricity and expected to perform any number of back-breaking duties in a day.

That's not to say that our monied characters don't have terrifying experiences of their own. The mental ward chapter was especially scary, having gone through a similar experience myself. Kay's admission is still very similar to how it's done today, and is enough to drive one to madness if they weren't already there. Public mental health care in the US is like maintaining a fire department without fire codes, and it hasn't markedly improved in the last 80 years. One's husband cannot trap you in the ward merely on his say-so, but the criteria for release are still frustratingly vague.

This is in many ways a tremendously important novel to read today, even though things have certainly improved for the better. Most people today understand that it was bad for women in the past, but it's hard to imagine the ways that such oppression sustained itself. For so many historical studies of sexism and racism, it's a tempting answer to just say they were dumber back in the day; while this is somewhat true when you consider lead-poisoning and alcohol consumption of the day, it's a dangerously incomplete answer. Grappling with the particulars of how we demeaned women is gruesome but necessary so we understand that oppression doesn't come in flashing neon. It slips into your very ways of thinking, masquerading as a web of supporting assumptions that can't be eliminated until the entire system has been unmasked and hacked away.

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LibraryThing member omniavanitas

I'd always been curious about The Group, having attended Vassar (albeit well after McCarthy's day). This novel is enlightening and infuriating. Women's lives, even among the prosperous and educated, were so different less than century ago.

Although the book skips around from character to character

quickly, sometimes dropping storylines abruptly, McCarthy seems to provide just the right amount of information to allow the reader to draw her own conclusions. I was surprised at the frankness with which premarital sex and birth control were discussed. Very interesting.

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LibraryThing member Rincey

The last few chapters made the first few worth laboring through. I really disliked some of the characters, but I really LOVED other characters.

LibraryThing member irishwasherwoman

An interesting read for 2009 since it was written 40+ years ago about women from the 30's. This novel follows the lives of 8 Vassar graduates from the Class of '33 - an age of rapidly changing mores for women. It addresses the conventions of friendship, marriage, child rearing, socialism, equality,

and etiquette in a satirical and searing, although sometimes tiresome, way. It was insightful to think about the times of the setting, the writing, and the reading. This was my first McCarthy novel and definitely not my last.

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LibraryThing member TheoClarke

Satirical exploration of the lives of classmates from Vassar's class of 1933. The subsequent responses of the author's classmates indicate that this was in part a roman a clef. It shows little sympathy for the women and dissects their attitudes and values with surgical severity.

LibraryThing member itchyfeetreader

a well written tale of seven new Vassar graduates (the class of 33) and their experiences in the 10 years post graduation. In many ways it is a more modern tale than i had been expecting with pre marital sex, contracepetion, child rearing and distain of men as common themes. The writing is sharp

and in places the satire is strong however i found the lack of a clear storyline and plot and the movement between each of the group distracting.

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LibraryThing member otterley

An enjoyable read (I devoured it almost at one sitting, on a quiet Sunday) that has a cinematic (or possibly televisual?) quality. Its sexual frankness, multi stranded narrative and hard headed clarity about the reality of the women's lives it focuses on, made it an influential precursor of a range

of 'women's novels' of varying quality levels. It is an excellent reminder that our mothers, grandmothers and great grandmothers fell in love, had sex and tried to work out what sort of people they were through, often harsh, trial and error in a world less forgiving to educated women than is our own...

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LibraryThing member spvaughan

It was a book of it's time but as a student in the mid 60's, I still could relate to it.

LibraryThing member Schmerguls

820 The Group, by Mary McCarthy (read 19 Sep 1965) I disapproved of the morals of the characters in this book, and my reaction to it was colored by that disapproval.

LibraryThing member pinkcrayon99

Mary McCarthy wrote a book about the “real” issues women have when they graduate college and begin to start careers and families. The story was so engaging that I felt a part of The Group. Set in the 1930’s during the Great Depression with all seven members of The Group being upper and middle

class white women.

The Group formed while the ladies were attending Vassar College. We begin our journey with them after their graduation from Vassar and in attendance at Kay and Harald’s wedding. Kay was the glue of The Group but Lakey was the Queen Bee. Lakey was the flame and all the other girls were the moths. The privileged background of all the girls was laid out in specific detail until sometime you got bogged down just in the details. These ladies were a part of the high society and upper crust but they dealt with normal everyday issues like most women no matter the class. Each woman held a uniqueness that contributed to the entire Group. The Group ranged from the Stepford wives to the politically involved.

The story stayed true to the era. This was an era where women were still testing the waters to see just how far they could break away from the ever so enforced gender roles. There is not an underlying “feminist” theme but there is a silent rebellion against husbands and ultra starchy mothers. These ladies were well educated and wanted a place in the workforce which was male dominated at the time. We read how one took her place, Libby. Libby was my least favorite character in the novel with Kay coming a close second. Libby was the critic with an air if “out do-ness.” Kay simply tried too hard and in the end it proved detrimental. My favorite would have to be Polly. Polly overcame all the odds and really found true happiness. She was the one member of The Group that did not have privilege to rely on. Of course there was a villain, who was an outsider that attended Vassar as well named Norine. Norine was t catalyst for the main turn of events. This definition of catalyst explains her actions perfectly: “ something that causes activity between two or more persons or forces without itself being affected.”

There is no doubt that I fell in love with The Group. We begin with a wedding and end with a funeral. There is an amazing amount of life to deal with in between. The ladies are faced with losing virginity, marriage, domestic violence, adultery, breast feeding, insanity, and lesbianism. No matter what culture or class you belong to you will get lost in The Group.

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LibraryThing member Kasthu

The Group is the story of eight roommates from Vassar living in New York City in the 1930s. Although the author is extremely candid about topics such as sex, marriage, and other “forbidden” subjects, I felt that at times the author was merely trying to be provocative, without actually adding

much to the story line. Because there are so many main characters, it’s also hard to keep track of them at times, and I felt that several of their stories didn’t wrap up so well at the end (or they were too well wrapped up). That said, I thought that McCarthy’s depiction of recent college graduates living in the “big city” was right on (even though I did it 70 years later, things haven’t changed much!).

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LibraryThing member dbsovereign

Perhaps a bit outdated now, this book nevertheless succeeds in capturing the feeling for a certain time in our history by exploring the lives of some young women entering the real world after attending to their ivory tower education (at Vassar). It also succeeds in capturing some of the angst and

self-consciousness of growing up in an absurd world - one which is just as absurd now.

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LibraryThing member Jspig

This book apparently caused quiet the scandal when it was first published in 1963. The story centers on a cohort of 8 girls from the Vassar class of 1933 called The Group. Each chapter focuses on a period in one of the girls lives. The girls issue's run the gamut from bad marriages to theories on

child rearing to sex and birth control. After reading a pretty graphic scene in which one character is fitted for a diaphragm, I understood where the scandal came from. I mean, the book was published two years before Griswold v. Connecticut, it wasn't even legal for unmarried women to get a diaphragm in many states!

While I found the book interesting, I never really warmed to any of the characters. The writing is very internal, mostly a description of the girl's life and her thoughts on whatever issue she's dealing with. They almost seem like archetypes rather than real people. McCarthy was herself a member of the class of '33, maybe these women are based on people she know, or maybe they are all facets of herself.

One thing I found odd what that this book is about this great group of friends, but we rarely see them interact with each other.

It took me a while to get into the book, but once I did, I enjoyed it. It's interesting reading about this time period from someone who lived it.

NetGalley Review

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LibraryThing member GraceZ

Another 1930s book for me, and what a good one. Very interesting, addressing all manner of topics such as birth control, homosexuality, breastfeeding, women's education, and more.

It makes me think two things: Wow, so much has changed since the 1930s, and Wow, nothing has changed since the 1930s.

LibraryThing member whitreidtan

When this was written, it caused a huge scandal. And it's fairly easy to see why even in the very beginning of the book. Mary McCarthy's novel, The Group, proves that for women anyway, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Set in 1933, the novel centers on a group of friends all

recently graduated from Vassar. They come together in the beginning to attend the slightly odd, definitely unconventional marriage of one of their number and they will come together again in the end, seven years on for a funeral. The young women are heading in different directions following their graduations and although their lives are somewhat constrained by the time they live in, they do have some options. One will go to Europe. Several will get jobs. One will come into her own sexually with nary a wedding ring in sight. Some have money. Some don't. But they are all educated women embarking on their adult lives with fresh attitudes and expectations, some aligned with the social mores of the times and some in direct opposition.

The chapters focus more on individual women rather than the group as a whole, which makes sense as they are all dispersing into their post-collegiate lives but that structure makes it a little difficult to see them as a group and to weigh their interactions with each other to see how they differ from when they were all living together at school. In a way it seems as if this is more a collection of character sketches rather than a novel with any discernible plot. As a historical novel, written about the 1930s and published as short stories in the late 50s and finally as a complete novel in 1963, it is fascinating (and not a little depressing) to see that we are still facing many of the same social issues that these women were eighty some years ago. The book touches on so many things: politics, literature, religion, class, mental illness, parenting styles, opportunities for women, homosexuality, and so on. And it certainly explores the nature of friendship, the shifting relationships between the women in the group and the way that outside forces change those seemingly solid, college-forged relationships. Some of the women appear in the pages often while others, despite their apparent importance to the group as a whole, hardly feature at all. And because the narrative follows one and then another friend in great chunks, it can be difficult to remember which member of the group has experienced which event. As a social history it succeeds, but as an engaging novel, it doesn't do nearly as well. I found it to be a bit meandering and long-winded, boring even. Unfortunate when the language is clearly so polished and the potential for an engaging novel is so obviously there.

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LibraryThing member Brainannex

I'm not sure how I encountered this book but what a joy it was to read. Eight young women from Vassar are graduated and starting their own lives. The book follows their stories as they weave in and out with each other and the wildly different paths they take.

LibraryThing member cindywho

This was one of the most fascinating books I've read in a while. Sex and the city - 1930's Manhattan. It was written in the 50's and was on the best seller list for two years when birth control, bad husbands, mental illness, and baby shit were still forbidden topics in polite society. It follows a

few members of a group of friends who went to Vassar together and meet with varying amounts of success in careers and marriage over the decade. The interest is in considering what has changed in nearly 100 years, and what has not.

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LibraryThing member debnance

It’s important to know that the copyright on this book is 1954. Also, I should share that the story takes place during America’s Great Depression.If you didn’t know these two facts, you might think this is just another book of contemporary women’s fiction. The Group is the story of seven

college friends and what happens to them over a ten year period. (See what I told you…Does that sound like a contemporary women’s fiction novel, or what?) But this book was much, much better than any contemporary women’s fiction novel I’ve read. It could be because it was the first of its kind, but I think it’s a little more than that. It’s literate with fascinating characters. And there is the time travel factor….I really felt like I was back in 1932 with these women. I would be thinking, Gee, these women are just like me, and then Whump! The author would put in a little dialogue or a little subplot and I’d remember, No, these are women who never had the opportunities I have despite their first-rate educations and affluent backgrounds. I’m not sure whether to classify it as a must-read. I’m terribly happy I read it and I’d encourage others to read it, but it is soap-y here and there.

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LibraryThing member PilgrimJess

"You mustn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex"

First published in 1963, this novel follows the lives of a group of eight young women after leaving exclusive Vassar College as they find love and heartbreak, careers and relationships, sex and babies, against a backdrop of

1930's New York. McCarthy herself graduated from Vassar in 1933 but I have no idea whether or not any of the characters were based on herself or any of her classmates.

The story opens with a wedding and ends with a funeral, both for the same person-Kay, each event is attended by the other members of the 'group'. Kay is the first to marry and to die. The story shifts between the viewpoint of several but not all of the group members.

The novel covers many of the issues of the day. Dottie loses her virginity to one of Kay's wedding guests, enjoys it and goes to get herself fitted with contraception, Polly has an affair with a married man who is in counselling, Priss struggles to breastfeed her newborn son in hospital and is caught between conflicting theories about whether breast or bottle feeding is best, even how the lady of the house should treat her staff in a changing world. Meanwhile, the cracks in Kay's marriage are soon apparent. At college her ambition was to work in the theatre but she has to take a job in Macy's to fund her husband's own theatrical ambitions. These women come from a privileged echelon of society and are highly educated yet still struggle to make their mark in male dominated and sexist society.

The story is told in the third person which means that it isn't easy to get close to any of the characters, the reader is able to see what will happen next before they can. Kay and Dottie are naive whilst Norine is shallow yet they still come out of it better than all of the male characters. Similarly the sex scenes, despite being fairly explicit, felt mechanical rather than emotional. It soon becomes obvious that the author was more focused on the themes than the characterisation.

First published in 1963 this book could be seen as a forerunner of today's chick-lit meaning that I'm not really part of its target audience. That said and done I found myself smiling on a few occasions, especially when Priss was in hospital, and felt the opening scenes concerning the wedding were well written and what I imagine to be evocative of a by-gone era. However, best of all the author resisted the temptation to tie everything up in a neat tidy bow with some fairytale endings. As such I quite enjoyed it and feel that it deserves to be more widely read.

"We are the hero of our own story."

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LibraryThing member jostie13

Mary McCarthy wrote each of these characters with such complexity and compassion that I couldn't help but identify intimately with every one. It was almost jarring to go to the next chapter and read a disparaging comment about what had just transpired with the character before--I wanted to rush to

her defense, every time, until I was convinced to the perspective of this new woman. Ultimately, though, it was their fierce loyalty, even when they didn't understand each other, that won me over. I might have to purchase this one.

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