Culture

Publisher: Hachette
(4.5/5)

 
I’ve got to admit, first of all, to being a big Sex in the City fan. So, I was pleased to see Candace Bushnell’s introduction of this newly re-released version of a classic, dare I say, feminist novel first published in 1964. It spent two years on the New York Times Bestseller List; it gave voice to an era of women who pretended and sublimated sexual energy in public, but raged in private; it was, in every sense, the 1930s version of Sex in the City. Following a ruling in Ireland, the book was banned by New Zealand Customs for reasons including: the characters' sexuality, the suggestions of homosexuality, and promiscuity. All of which makes the book a jolly good read.
McCarthy (1912-1989) was married four times, and wrote prolifically and politically. She lost her virginity at the age of 14 “in the front seat of a Marmon roadster to a man twice her age.” In between her first and second marriages, she boasts, “she had a series of affairs … [and] at one point [she] stopped counting the number of men she slept with in her Greenwich Village apartment.” None of this is necessarily considered extraordinary or even risqué now, but it certainly was in the 1930s, when The Group is set.
The Group itself is a clique of Vassar graduates, whose lives readers follow for seven years. The novel starts with a wedding and concludes with a funeral as WWII is starting to warm up in Europe. These women are the privileged elite. They come from money and work out of curiosity and interest, not need, even during the Depression. They push the boundaries of decency, and well before the invention of the Pill these gals are getting fitted for diaphragms or crossing their fingers that the coitus was indeed interruptus. 
This book should be read today as a satire. It is well written, honest, brutal, and challenging. It was a bit hard to get into but once you get familiar with the characters, it becomes compelling, fascinating and necessary to get to the end.