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A review by trin
The Group by Mary McCarthy
3.0
An impressive book, but not one that I particularly enjoyed. McCarthy somewhat sporadically follows the lives of a bunch of Vassar graduates as they make bad choices, take up with nasty men, and are generally just as nasty to each other and everyone else. I really didn’t like anyone in this book. They are all products of their time, to be sure—racist, classist, sexist. Their attitudes are probably accurate. But man, it was unpleasant spending 500 pages in their heads. It made it very hard to sympathize with them, even, say, the one married to a cruel and emotionally abusive man called Harald—which was also the name of McCarthy’s first husband. You don’t want to get on McCarthy’s bad side, I’m thinking.
It’s fun, though, to watch her verbally eviscerate someone, whether as herself taking on her nemesis, [a:Lillian Hellman|66241|Lillian Hellman|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1257464297p2/66241.jpg]—“every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’”—or in the guise of Lakey, the leader of the Group, who comes back from Europe at this novel’s end accompanied by her baroness girlfriend and rips horrible Harald a new one. It’s a great moment, but it was really hard for me to get through the entire book to arrive there. I don’t doubt for one second that people like McCarthy portrays did exist, or that much of wealthy white society in the ’30s was exactly like this—the book feels brutally authentic. However, I wouldn’t have wanted to spent time with these creeps then, and I don’t want to now, either. Reading this book was a bit too much like being stuck at an interminable party full of people you don’t much like—and who make no secret of the fact that they freakin' hate you.
It’s fun, though, to watch her verbally eviscerate someone, whether as herself taking on her nemesis, [a:Lillian Hellman|66241|Lillian Hellman|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1257464297p2/66241.jpg]—“every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’”—or in the guise of Lakey, the leader of the Group, who comes back from Europe at this novel’s end accompanied by her baroness girlfriend and rips horrible Harald a new one. It’s a great moment, but it was really hard for me to get through the entire book to arrive there. I don’t doubt for one second that people like McCarthy portrays did exist, or that much of wealthy white society in the ’30s was exactly like this—the book feels brutally authentic. However, I wouldn’t have wanted to spent time with these creeps then, and I don’t want to now, either. Reading this book was a bit too much like being stuck at an interminable party full of people you don’t much like—and who make no secret of the fact that they freakin' hate you.