This evening’s edition of the Big City Book Club brings us to “The Group,†Mary McCarthy’s 1963 novel about an octet of Vassar graduates set loose on New York and the world. To kick things off, I’ve shared my first thoughts on the book (and lots of questions) below. Please post your own thoughts in the comments section, and return this evening from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. Eastern time, when we’ll be discussing the book live.
Our co-host tonight is the writer James Collins, author of the acclaimed 2008 novel “Beginner’s Greek,†another best seller that rendered Manhattan â€" his native ground â€" in rich social detail. His response to the book will follow later this afernoon. Jim, this didn’t occur to me until after I asked you to join us, but you are the son of a Vassar graduate, so all the more reason you’re perfectly suited to this forum (and perfectly suited to answer questions about campus rituals like the Daisy Chain).
McCarthy had it in her head to write a novel about a group of alumnae of Vassar’s class of 1933 â€" the year she herself graduated from Vassar â€" for a long time. When she started writing in 1952, the idea was to follow the women through the Depression and World War II and into the ’50s. In the end, the novel makes it midway through the Roosevelt years and ends amid fears of the escalating war.
More intimately (and spoilers follow from here) the book ends with Kay’s funeral â€" Kay, the member of the group whose unconventional wedding to a bohemian actor begins and anchors the story. It is not a marriage for the ages. Harald, the husband, immediately arouses suspicions. Jim, as you pointed o! ut to me last week, Harald (spelled precisely that way) was also the name of the first of McCarthy’s four husbands, so I think we’re free to leap to whatever conclusions we may about how much was done to protect the identities of both the innocent and wayward.
It is tempting to say that this is a book about women not getting what they want: things don’t end well for the various members of Vassar ’33. In an interview in The Paris Review in the early 1960s, McCarthy said she intended to show a gradual “loss of faith†in the whole “idea of progress in the feminine sphere.†But I’m left wondering how much faith there was to begin with.
Libby possesses a genuine ambition to succeed in the literary world, and that desire is present on the page. But for a number of the characters, what they really want is a lot muddier. Dottie wants the artist Dick, the young man with whom she has a fling at the beginning of the book â€" but not enough to give up the prospect of marriage to a wealthy rizonan, and not as much as her more liberated mother seems to wants him for her. But how does the pursuit of a complete jerk, essentially on the basis of a single satisfying sexual encounter, represent some notion of “progress,†the abandonment of which we are supposed to mourn
The question, I think: Is McCarthy settled herself on what progress would really look like I don’t know.
This is all sounding more sober and serious than I mean to be. The book’s plus-ça-change factor is really quite amazing. The pressure to breast feed (in three-hour cycles! With the husband doing the pressuring!) could come straight from the message boards of Park Slope Parents. And how many employers sit across the desk from 22-year-old liberal arts graduates thinking exactly the same thoughts as Gus LeRoy: “You are just one of two million English majors coming here hoping to be Maxwell Perkins. Next!†I’m also struck by the fact that 80 years from t! he time t! he novel is set, the magazines in which a young serious person would want to write remain the same: Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Nation.
As many of us do, I get nostalgic for periods in the city’s history that predate me. I’m now left wishing I came of age in the Manhattan of the New York Central â€" specifically, the New York Central’s special weekend ski line to the Berkshires and all its apparent social opportunities. What made you want to time travel The Clover Club I’ve never seen one on a 2013 cocktail menu despite the fact that we’re supposed to be living in the era of the mixologist.
So, Book Club Members â€" and Jim â€" does the novel stand up to the 10-year test It took McCarthy a decade to write. Were these 10 years warranted The book was a huge commercial success but it was panned in the sort of places that would have mattered most to its author, particularly among the New York Review of Books, of which McCarthy was of course a part. (First came a parody f the book and then, as if that weren’t enough, a withering essay from Norman Mailer.) What about the 50-year test Does it provide sufficient insights into our present moment
Take it away!
