Mary Therese McCarthy (1912–1989)

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.
… (mer)

Mary McCarthy is my 1930s soul sister. She was a hussy of incomparable wit with a somewhat tragic past (orphaned by the Spanish flu pandemic, sent to live with a sadistic aunt). All the reviews of this book mention it as her succès de scandale because of her habits in the bedroom, but if published today I'd imagine her Trotskyism would garner more attention. At any rate, it's not her objectionable behavior that makes the stories good, but instead her clever characters. My favorite story was probably "Rogue's Gallery," about her time employed as the stenographer for a con-man gallery owner and the friendship that grew between them. And at the risk of sounding bitter, I loved her cynical sketches of men in relationships, particularly in "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt" (cross-country train affair!) and "Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man" (oh snap! this story is such a good burn!). At this point I've already got her best known work, The Group, her "intellectually rigorous" correspondence with Hannah Arendt, and one of her biographies queued up at the library. Will let you know how they turn out.… (mer)

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.… (mer)