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. ( )

Des jeunes filles de Vassar découvrent le statut de femmes mariées. Une révélation sur la manipulation de femmes brillantes par des butors mâles. A l'époque me oaraissait spécifique des Etats Unis.

This brilliant social document (to paraphrase the quote on the book cover) tells the stories of several savvy Vassar grads with varying and dynamic personalities, careers, political persuasions, and personal affairs--who all interact in and around New York City. It's filled with satire and historical imagery and taught me tons about the political atmosphere in the 1930s (it was written around 1960). McCarthy is wonderful--she was a frequent New Yorker contributor and wrote these full-bodied characters astutely and intelligently and lovingly.

It's unfortunate that time has not already proven this novel a classic. Besides when I saw Betty Draper read it on Mad Men (Weiner loves those time stamps, y'all) and when an older man saw my copy and said he "hadn't seen anyone reading that in over 35 years," I've never encountered another person who's heard of it. It was the #1 best seller in 1964 and apparently every woman had her nose in it that year. Wish more men would read this. But, with a cast full of ladies, it's been pegged as a woman's novel ever since publication.
( )

Read this for my Zoom book club. Rather, it was a reread—I think I first read it when I was in my early 20s, but so much of what makes it a really meaty novel just went right over my head. Which makes me marvel at how truly oblivious I must have been at that age, despite having been raised in a reasonably aware liberal household and living in NYC. I just wasn't a political animal, I guess, because the big themes she shifts around with her eight or so main characters—class and sexism, mainly, with a little anti-Semitism and racism thrown in—did not weigh in my mind at the time, as I remember.

This time around I found it all fascinating and horrifying, as well as an entertaining read, a slow burn of amusing, annoying, satirical, and then appalling—kind of a rear-view-mirror dystopia, published the year I was born and all the more unsettling for that intersection into my own time line. Especially given the recent Supreme Court rollback of Roe... it's not as far back in the rear-view mirror as I'd like it to be, these days.

Anyway, too much going on in the book (Vassar grads in the 1930s moving through young adulthood, trials both of the time and timeless, and some really awful men) to describe, but it's worth a read for sure. And it made for a very good book club discussion. ( )

This book made me want to dish with my lady friends and drink cocktails.