The Group by Mary McCarthy

The worst fate, they utterly agreed, would be to become like Mother and Dad, stuffy and frightened. Not one of them, if she could help it, was going to marry a broker or a banker or a coldfish corporation lawyer, like so many of Mother's generation. They would rather be wildly poor and live on salmon wiggle than be forced to marry one of those dull purplish young men of their own set, with a seat on the Exchange and bloodshot eyes, interested only in squash and cockfighting and drinking at the Racquet club with his cronies, Yale or Princeton '29. It would be better, yes, they were not afraid to say it, though Mother gently laughed, to marry a Jew if you loved him--some of them were awfully interesting and cultivated, though terribly ambitious and inclined to stick together, as you saw very well at Vassar: if you knew them you had to know their friends. There was one thing, though, truthfully, that made them feel a little anxious for Kay. It was a pity in a way that a person as gifted as Harald and with a good education had had to pick the stage, rather than medicine or architecture or museum work, where the going was not so rough.

Mary McCarthy's The Group begins with a wedding: Kay is marrying Harald, a somewhat untrustworthy and dilettantish playwright. But the real inciting incident, the moment that really sets the novel's action in motion, is the graduation from Vassar of the characters who make up the titular "Group": rich, portly Pokey; beautiful, cold Lakey; literary Libby; lovesick Dottie; poor Polly--and Helena, and Priss, and Norine. Graduation is a moment of dizzying possibility, the moment when you are ushered into "real life," and like presumably every generation before them, the women of the Group are dead-set on not doing things the way their parents did them. They will marry for love, not money, but they will also pass the various tests of success that life lays out for them; they will stretch, but not break, convention. Kay's marriage to Harald only happens to be the first of these many choices, and for the Group, who distrusts Harald (and with good reason), it is a mixed bag. On one hand, it's a sign that that real life really has begun to hurtle at them excitingly, like a train. On the other hand, the possibility that the marriage is ill-conceived is more than a tragedy; it's an omen.

The Group, which famously inspired Candace Bushnell to write Sex and the City, is perhaps remembered best today because of its frank attitude toward sex. When Dottie goes home from Kay's wedding with Dick Brown, a beguiling but contemptuous artist, he initiates her into the painful world of sex for the first time, and afterward gives her instructions on how to obtain a diaphragm. McCarthy describes in detail the grueling and somewhat humiliating process of Dottie's fitting, followed by the further humiliation of waiting for Dick with a park with the diaphragm on a bag in her lap. Realizing at last that he's not coming for her, she stashes it under a bench, perhaps to be discovered by some unsuspecting park steward.

But The Group is frank about a lot of things, not all of which are explicitly sexual. In fact, one of the more interesting throughlines of the novel is its focus on the girls' medical experiences, of which Dottie's diaphragm fitting is only one. I was struck by Priss' section, in which she, having just had a baby--see how the novel takes us step by step through the various milestones of post-college life--finds herself in a moral struggle between her doctors and her doctor husband as to whether or not she should breastfeed. In The Group, much of a woman's life is determined at the doctor, which can become a staging ground for masculine battles for control. Even in absentia, Dottie's diaphragm visit is a kind of play by Dick for control over her body in the same way that Priss becomes the prize in a war between male doctors. The Group, set at a moment when psychotherapy and analysis are on the rise, and the mind, too, has recently become the property of the medical field, extends this to the world of psychology--see how Polly thinks of her boyfriend Gus' analyst as her unseen enemy. The ultimate example of this comes at the end, when Harald, a true shit, has Kay institutionalized against her will. The hospital, she is told, will only release her to her husband--who has disappeared.

I thought that The Group had a real richness to it--a richness of detail, of character, of irony. I could barely keep the characters apart, but I think that's all right. Though they lead radically different lives--some are rich, some are poor, some married and some not--there is a sense in which the boundaries between the blur. It might be too much to say that they are, like, a collective expression of womanhood, but I do think it's true that in the aggregate they elevate the novel above its materialist and cultural particulars to something more universal. The Group is keenly aware of the changing nature of their world. Sometimes this is funny--I don't think I've laughed at any single line as hard as I did when one of them asks another, "Have you tasted the new Corn Niblets?"--but it also takes in sweeping cultural movements like psychoanalysis and socialism. (One of the divides that develops between the members of the Group is which of them identify as Stalinists and which of them identify as Trotskyites.) And yet, the more things change, it seems, the more they stay the same: the power of sex, the drama of divorce, the specter of rape, the repressive nature of convention, the cage of motherhood. Kay's marriage with Harald provides a throughline for all these stories, and when it explodes, it does so disastrously, giving the book its disquieting ending.