Mary McCarthy has a beautiful, natural use of words that makes the reading experience a walk in the park. The high use of details sometimes contribute to the story (like in the excellent Chapter 11 with the Polly & Gus story; with a great twist at the end), but sometimes can be counterproductive (like in Chapter 13, the Polly and Kay story, with waaaay too many details about procedures, details about the hospital etc.). All chapters can be read as short stories by the way, because it's all about the characters.
McCarthy's observations are all splendid, and these are translated in 15 striking little miniatures of Modern Life (with a shocking conclusion: there's no big difference in the way we view and order our life then (1930s) and now).
A nice read; if only she could have fine tuned the balancing between construction and details.

Funny and eventful as any soap opera, The Group is worth reading just to experience the "the more things change, the more they stay the same" factor--as well as to move firsthand through a text that drew harsh criticism from critics and revered authors when it was first published in 1963. Frank representations of sex, contraception, infidelity, politics both personal and public made 1960's audiences clutch their pearls, but not before keeping The Group on the NYT bestseller list for two years. It's an interesting combination of "the bad old days" and... just like today.

“Love and sex can be two separate things. They don't have to be, but they can be. You mustn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex… You have to live without love, learn not to need it, in order to live with it.”

With such modern language and unabashed discussion of taboo themes, no wonder this book was a phenomenon of its age! The style is practically the same as used by contemporary writers and, as other reviewers pointed out, the stories are not too different from what is portrayed in novels about women living in New York, such as Sex & the City.
From politics to sex to finances to psychology, all sorts of themes are tackled by the author unapologetically and without unecessary frills.
On the downside, I felt that some of the characters were left unexplored, which is not surprising considering there are 8 main characters. I must confess, at some point I could not remember much about some of them. It is hard to keep track, as their families and their partners and friends are also introduced. So I feel that the real object of this book was not the characters but what they represented and the themes eack of them explored in the book.
Overall, I really enjoyed it, it was entertaining. My favourite characters were Polly and her father Mr. Andrews. Polly was perhaps one of the easiest characters to relate to, at least from our modern standards.
A footnote for the Penguin edition I have and didn't make the book easy to read at all. By trying to make this a pocketbook, the lettering is tiny and there are practically no paragraphs, making it quite tiresome to read.

This book was mentioned in one or several books I’d recently read. I had bought it a while ago at a used book sale. The original price in this hardback, published in 1963 (first in 1954), was $5.95. It is a book about a group of eight women in the years immediately after they graduate from Vassar. Though it is set in the 1930’s, it is not that different from a number of other books I’ve read with the same theme. That said, after a slow start, I did enjoy the book and it got me through a long day at the hospital while my mother had surgery. Also, I knew a Mary McCarthy, who died earlier this year and every time I looked at the cover, I thought of her.

The Group was introduced to me as the initial inspiration for Sex and the City and perhaps that's harmed its critical reputation. One might assume that this is a frothy, light, gossipy bit of a novel as a result. It's not. It's densely populated and generous of dialogue. While there may not be much of a straightforward plot, and each scene functions more like a vignette, these vignettes are explored in intense detail, and feel as though they are unfolding in real time, revealing the often terrible truths of these women's lives. Some of these women only receive one or two chapters, and throughout the seven-year timespan, large swaths of these women's lives remain absent from the text. One characters' entire arc revolves around the era's conflicting and often terrible advice on childrearing. Another character has the loss of her virginity and her attempt to acquire birth control described in excruciating detail, and receives little else.

This can be frustrating to read, and hardly fun (truly, some of these women's lives are so subtly horrifying that I had to step away), but the novel unfolds slowly but purposefully. McCarthy's satire is sharp but she has sympathy for these women. Despite the unity implied by the title, and the back cover blurb that promises some sort of defiant reunion for the group, this is not a novel about female friendship conquering all. This is a novel about women being alienated—from their friends, their families, their lovers, and most strikingly, themselves. It's horrifyingly funny while also sharply sad.

mary mccarthy was a pick-me i hate to say it but

edit: was going through in my head of all the books i read this year and remembered all but this one. oops!

Even though I finished this the other day - and having been a fan of movie for years, I knew the general gist of it - but the experience of reading this book was one that has really seemed to stick with me.

Though some of it is so ridiculous - and not being a Vassar girl most of the French liberally scattered throughout the book went right over my head - there's a real resonsce about these characters. They seem so real. And for a book written in the 60s (or is it the 50s? I've heard 1963 and 1954) that takes place in the 30s, these girls are surprisingly modern, even by our standards. Just learning about 30s birth control is worth the price of admission.

At any rate, it's rare that a book hits me as hard as this one did.

There wasn't a whole lot of story in this book, just a group of women living life after college. The last 50 pages were fairly "scandalous" and enjoyable, but the thing that kept me reading throughout was that the thoughts and language of the 1930s and 1940s were done so well (at least it seems that way to me) that I didn't want to stop. This is the perfect book for anybody looking to read historical fiction about elite women in the early half of this century. I've not read anything like it.

This is the story of a group of college friends from Vassar in the 1930s. I mostly enjoyed it for the glimpses of life as an educated young woman back then, but I found it hard to get really close to the characters. A good read for the historical value, but not completely engrossing.