The Group, Mary McCarthy
Review by: MrsC

If you go to the WB Gilmore Girls cast site, under the part about Rory Gilmore there is a link called "Rory's Reading List." I thought it was interesting, so I put some of the books into my future reading list. Before our vacation to the lake about 2 weeks ago I actually bought 2 of the books on the list. One I finished this past Friday, The Group by Mary McCarthy.

The Group is about 8 Vassar graduates and the few years after their graduation. Their graduating year was 1933, just toward the end of the depression, before World War II, before Vassar became the first of the Seven Sisters to go co-ed. The time when people referred to World War I as "The Great War." It dealt with a wide variety of issues including, but not limited to: sex, marriage, the class system, sex, politics (specifically Communisim, Socialism, Republicans, and Democrats), employment opportunities for educated women in the 1930s, sex, the generation gap, and more sex.

Though The Group consists of 8 women, the author focuses on 3 or 4 of the women and their new lives in New York City. The book opens on Kay's wedding. A rather odd gathering of Vassar graduates and the theater people that the groom (Harald) works with. Just the wedding shows how different the minds of the group worked. A few of the women were appalled at the lack of ceremony, no parents, no bridesmaids or groomsmen, and how low class the whole affair was. Other women were embracing the informality of the event as a charming characteristic of their friend, ignoring the lack of social grace that the bride was exhibiting by her marriage to this man of the theater, a man well below her class.

The book proceeds like this with all decisions being made by the girls in regards to their class or their politics, or in spite of their class or their poitics. Should a woman agree with her husband because he is her husband (and a pediatrician with new fangled ideas... a Vassar garduate breastfeeding? that is so low class!) or should she conform to the views of the rest of the women in the hospital when it comes to giving birth? How should an educated single woman deal with her father's mental illness? Obivously premarital sex is okay, there are no prudes in this group, but the reasons why the women choose to have sex are done with such decisivness, not the way the women are swept off their feet in today's modern age.

Mary McCarthy does not choose any one view in this novel. She merely paints a portrait of what life was. McCarthy did it in such a way that it becomes a delight to read, to wonder about the signs of those times and marvel at the difference over half a century can make.

Rory did a great job on recommending this book.

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