Character study designed to be shocking and progressive

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	• The Group Mary McCarthy Harvest Books, 1991 - 492 pages average customer review:based on 15 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Character study designed to be shocking and progressive

McCarthy explores hot button social and political issues that were controversial at the time of the book's publication. In order to do this, she describes the lives of eight "upper crust" friends from the Vassar Class of 1933 in the five years following their graduation.

Each life story is used as a vehicle to discuss issues like pre-marital sex, adultry, birth control, divorce, homosexuality, Freudian psychiatry and mental illness, breastfeeding, racism, and Socialism and Communism. While the characters become quite vivid, this literary device ends up feeling heavy and obvious.

I also found the political issues to be quite confusing. I admit that I am not very well educated about Communist and Socialist movements in the U.S. in the 1930's. (Barbara Streisand in "The Way We Were" comes to mind.) McCarthy talks about multiple movements within both philosophies, and I did not follow apparently important nuances.

While this book held my interest, it has lost some impact over time because it no longer presents new points of view about progressive ideas. Many of the points that were quite controversial, are now firmly part of the American consciousness. Most of us are no longer surprised that (good) people use birth control, that (good) people we know are gay, or that many (good) people have mental illness.

Perhaps this book is most valuable in the way that it provides a social history lesson and points to a better future. In 50 or 60 or 70 years who knows how we will have grown in our understanding of our fellow humans? I suppose McCarthy gives me hope.

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A must have read ! Sweeping, emotional, unmistakable !

Mary McCarthy tells the emotional and ,for the time she lived in, really provocating story of eight friends that want to go their own way in life, career and love after their exam at Vassar in 1933. A group that couldn't be better mixed up, from a beauty to ugly one, from poor to rich, from profound to superficial, from ambitious to lazy....
Mary McCarthy shows the women in a period of 7 years, 7 years that change everything in the young lifes of these women, some marry and get divorced again, some get children and a lot of well-protected secrets become public. The story goes on in the view of each of them and so one always gets new informations about all of them. It's much talked about politics in that novel, too, because every kingpin is interested in politics in a time, 4 years after the commercial crisis and just in the time the World War II started. All of the women get their first experiences in love and lifestyle that are really different for every of them . The book is worth to read, because it's emotional, but not camp, it's the life of a middle-twenty-something-woman. The kingpins are active and actual and the story is sweeping and thrilling.

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I should have asked Grandma....

Okay, straight off I'll admit that I'm not a senior citizen so maybe there's something about this book that I'm missing. Or maybe some of you will agree with me. It was just a bit too much. Eight main characters who are all,at some point, THE main character. This being as it was, I found it impossible to get attached to any of them. I didn't really care about the conslusion though I suppose I should have felt sad about the tragic end of this wierdly timed romp. (I never was quite sure what year it was...)

OK Book

I think this book was written partly for the shock value in the early 60s. It seems to be me much of it is dribble. Its hard to phantom that women in their early 20s would be so naive about sex. I can't beleive I managed to read through a discourse on the logistics of keeping and storing a diaphram(sp) without getting nauseated. Then I was treated to another character justifying her affair with her friend's husband because her own husband was impotent. Allegedly he was impotent because he thought of his wife as a good girl. If that were the case she should have listened to her friend and told him what she was doing behind his back - that would have cured him. The book could have done without the discourse on breastfeeding. I got the impression that most of these women were stuck up spoiled rich kids. For the most part these educated women had the most atrocious choice of men. Only Polly finally found a decent man. It is a book I won't pick up to read again.

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WITH THE GIRLS

A group of girls of perfectly good background, recently graduated from Vassar ('33), decide to proceed to either work or higher education not because they really have to, but because they know that they have something to contribute to emergent America. Above all things, they don't wish to marry a banker or a lawyer and become "stuffy", they'd rather be "wildly" poor than be reduced to marrying a rich man of their own set... They'd rather marry a Jew! Such seems to be the Vassar spirit, around the early thirties in the past century (their families were too propertied to suffer during the Depression).

The girls are seen to face the challenge of building up their destinies with their intuitions. The fact that they mostly come from opulent families does not mean that they can start in life without passing through the necessary rituals and rites of initiation. The novel is the story of the development of instinct among these well-to-do females. They live in the midst of the capitalist world that was ushered in after the defeat of the Spanish Armada and their main challenge is to learn to live with privilege without losing their identities and sensibilities.

These girls are not laden with "class-guilt", which is explained by one of the characters at an informal party as a recessive gene (just like blue eyes). Their interest in politics is not wide. They are aware that life will not be without its unpleasant surprises, even to women like them. There certainly are unfaithful husbands and flippant lovers, and there is also the difficulty to live up to the college's expectations, even for the most accomplished among them.

Politics is part of the danger. As Mary Prothero's mother remarks: "People who live in glass houses should be above reproach". These girls all seem to try to be above reproach. But, is the society they are part of above reproach? What are the requirements of moral life in the new, "unnatural" age that at the time was beginning? Isn't the women's role that of transmutting the oldest into the newest, at any historical moment?

The young women of the group are aware that every act of living is a statement of class, of politics, and an emotion. Every choice in life, even from the most commonplace.. ultimately amounts to an ideological statement. As different from the other Vassar girls, such as Norine (and Kay is only in and out of the "group"), who see no difference between high and low, right, beautiful, and wrong, ugly... the "group" of seven (plus Kay) South (Ivory) Tower girls are all adequately intuitive about the role of aesthetics and goodness in life choices. It is not by coincidence that the alma mater of the group, Elinor, travels to Europe and Spain, to recover thosee lost traces, in Avila, the town of Catholic female mystics, of an older, perhaps gentler word. The world before the world of economy.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

McCarthy?s most celebrated novel portrays the experiences of eight young women from Vassar College, Class of ?33. As the story opens, they meet in New York City for the wedding of Kay, one of ?the group.? The author then describes the lives, loves, and aspirations of these women until they reconvene seven years later in the same city for Kay?s funeral. ?Juicy, shocking, witty, and almost continually brilliant? (Cosmopolitan).

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