There's a really good article in the July issue of Vanity Fair magazine that is well worth reading if you can get your hands on a copy, "Vassar Unzipped" abbout author Mary McCarthy and her novel The Group. I read The Group more than ten years ago--maybe even longer than ten year. It's been so long that all I can recall now is that I read it, with only a vague impression of the story still lingering, which is about eight Vassar graduates from the class of 1933 following their lives until 1940. I've long wanted to reread the book and this might just be the gentle nudge that does it. I have a feeling, too, that it's a book that I will not only appreciate more the second time around but most likely actually understand better with a good ten years (or more) behind me.
It's interesting to read about the book, which was both declared an instant classic yet also somewhat maligned. It made Mary McCarthy, who had already published short stories and had several novels under her belt a rich woman. It was a novel idea--a writer actually making money off her work. There's a line that she crossed from being simply an intectual who had written stories and novels to being a popular author. Not much has changed, you know, popular/bestseller and intellectual are not often considered equivalents. Popular usually means poorly written or executed. She was paid $100,000 for the paperback rights and movie rights were bought for the princely sum of $165,500.
"The Group made Mary McCarthy a very rich intellectual, one of America's first highbrows to receive gargantuan sums, thus changing the financial expectations of serious writers and the scale on which their work could be judged."
The Group was the sort of book that young women (and probably not so young women, too) read for the racy scenes. It was, of course, wildly popular. As much as it was talked about and praised, there was also a backlash that came with its popularity. Some characters might have been composites of a number of real women, but others could be picked out from McCarthy's own graduating class. Needless to say they were none too pleased about that.
It seems generally accepted that as novels go it works better as social history than literary fiction. Well received from some corners it might have been, but other reviews were quite scathing.
"It was honesty on another level that made the book controversial. McCarthy was matter-of-fact and often slapstick about subjects that everyone else deemed sacred-sex, motherhood, one's relationship with one's shrink. And she was completely unfazed by physiology."
It was published in 1963 along with Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, and Adrienne Rich's collection of poetry Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, riding the "second-wave of feminism", though I don't know that the feminist slant was what McCarthy was really going for with the novel. The book was not meant to be a satire or a joke but a "'true history of the times . . . '."
Vanity Fair also gives a list of "Watched Potboilers". Tongue-in-cheek they give the genre the name "Young Women on Life's Threshold" naming Samuel Richardson's (1748) Clarissa one of the oldest. Their list includes:
Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk (1955)
The Valley of the Dolls by Jaqueline Susann (1966)
A Summer Place by Sloan Wilson (1958)
The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe (1958)
Looking for Mr. Goodbar by Judith Rossner (1975)
Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973)
Wouldn't it be fun to read through the list? It has "reading project" written all over it. I think I might roll it around in my mind for later. That's a young Candice Bergan in the photo above, by the way, in the movie adaptation. The author has more to say about the novel and McCarthy--do check it out.