Provided that your girlfriend can drive on the freeway, you might spend Saturdays at the beach. Mine can and we do. After ritually sacrificing a tube of sunscreen, we unwrap soft deli sandwiches and I am bowled over by my good luck. Lately, the ocean in Los Angeles is warm, weirdly warm, remarking in tones of surprise and disquiet warm. Recalling the blue-lipped ocean swimming of my youth and queasily confronting the sea as a changeable, changed thing, I feel bad, almost, halfway, about how lovely it is to play in, the gaudy ease. Within seconds I’m diving under docile green waves and laughing, mouth wide, floating star-fished, body endless. After the swimming is the sprawling. We stalk back to our blanket to eat watermelon out of the cooler and smear salt on our phones. Generally, being annoying, I haul along several books for a single beach day. The selection will include one or two aspirational titles, things I feel I ought to be reading, perhaps to write about, or else for some squinty sense of my edification. Almost always, having touched these with wet hands, crouched over our beach bag feeling my pulse in my knees, I will toss them aside in favor of one of my fat old favorites, those books which, read for a dozen summers over in hazy gulps, read while drenched in seawater, sticky with bug spray, floaty from wine, in the attic of my grandparents’ old house and in the backseat of cars, while lying in grass that made my sunwarmed ankles itch, read with legs propped on the railing of postage stamp motel balconies and beneath the sound of my mother chatting beside other people’s pools, have come to read like messages from past selves, from summers long burnt out and worlds only half-remembered. We go limp and quiet as the sun dries our hair and I enter the first chapter, experiencing as equally true and real both the hot sand beneath my feet and the walls of the chapel at St. George’s on Stuyvesant Square as they erect around me. When I come up for air, I see a reedy blonde draping orange and white striped towels over a circle of low-slung chairs while another woman, an echo of the first in all but the pattern on her sarong, maneuvers a teeming plastic wagon into the shade of an umbrella and begins to unload cheese plates and bottles of rosé. Soon, as I attempt pointed eye contact with my girlfriend, who is normal and doesn’t care, more women descend upon the camp, hugging and laughing and raising plastic wine glasses in the direction of the friend whose bikini is a crisp, striking white. A bachelorette party has sprung to life before our eyes. Suddenly, I am reading The Group in 4DX.
Mary McCarthy—sharp, principled, a bit of a hilarious crank—was already well ensconced as a critic and essayist in midcentury New York’s lefty intelligentsia scene when she wrote her novel about the dawning of adult life for eight graduates of the Vassar College class of 1933, a cohort to which McCarthy herself belonged. The Group, released in 1963, received pans of varying rigor from the professional intellectuals McCarthy counted as friends, while moving, before the year’s end, more than three hundred thousand copies. Alongside accusations of frivolity, the book was deemed unsporting by other Vassar alums who complained about an inappropriate and unkind public airing of their affairs. McCarthy would famously insist that all she’d done was, “take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.” The book Norman Mailer called “a trivial lady writer’s novel” spent two years on the New York Times best-seller list, its popularity with the unwashed (or, in this instance, perhaps, the fastidiously manicured) masses surely serving only to affirm the noble disdain of the literati. I am not against snobbishness. In fact, I mourn both robust and catty criticism and believe public discourse would be well-served were we to resuscitate such attitudes today. Mailer and his ilk do not wound with their self-satisfied sexism and refusal to understand McCarthy’s project. The issue is they’re dead wrong: The Group rules.
It’s a fine June day and Kay Strong has stunned her college roommates by becoming the first of their number to wed. Hungry, playful Kay, a “self-announced scientific atheist” and daughter of the American west, is marrying Harald Petersen, an arrogant switch-blade of a man, lean, miserable, gleaming, who intends to be a playwright. Before the novel concludes, Kay will be dead. In between the vivid scenes of her wedding and funeral, we bound through seven years in which the girls attend parties, flirt with communism, begin careers, breastfeed babies, ride the bus, adjust their gloves, talk to Mother, get deflowered by misanthrope artists, and cook pâté. As the close third person narration moves between characters, we glimpse each from different angles, exposing the gulf between their self-conceptions and how they are perceived. A close-knit garrulousness prevails. McCarthy’s prose is all-encompassing, deft—long soliloquies on political theory run up against lively descriptions of dresses, dinners, apartment layouts, gynecological equipment.
Though she operates in a key of wryness, eschewing sentimentality, and while the book is more than occasionally funny, the heart wins out. I, a mark, in fairness, am deeply moved by these girls, their hopes, their plans, their very bad dates, their Sunday night hair-washing, their faith in the myth of American progress which will prove grievously mislaid. As a social history of privileged, white young womanhood in 1930s America, The Group is a feat of tone control, threading the personal and the political gingerly and never toppling over, in either direction, into sneering condescension or braindead superficiality. I’ve heard talk—i.e. someone said this to me at a party once and I was rude about it—of readers struggling to tell one woman of The Group apart from the others. As an expert in the field of Girl Types, I have never had this experience and I cannot relate. It is instinct for me to note the most minute distinctions between said types of girls and to commit them permanently into my psychic rolodex. To those less adept, I can offer only my best wishes and this handy power ranking: 1. Lakey (savvy) 2. Polly (capable) 3. Helena (independent) 4. Priss (thoughtful) 5. Kay (vigorous) 6. Dottie (repressed) 7. Pokey (clueless) 8. Libby (delusional).
Kay’s wedding, a casual affair absent adult figures and featuring baked Alaska for dessert, is a challenge to the sensibilities of her blue blood schoolmates, and a fabulous set piece wherein to meet and get a sense of them all. Priss Hartshorn, “a dyed-in-the-wool-liberal” and general sweetie, senses that the Vassar girls have sown class animus amongst Harald and his few guests “through no fault of their own.” Episcopalian asthmatic Dottie Renfrew is winked at by a depressed guy and forgets her concerns about whether Kay lied her way into a church wedding. Sensing the haphazard nature of the nuptial events, Polly Andrews, a resourceful blonde and the affluent circle’s token Depression victim, her father having lost his fortune in the 1929 collapse, nurses a pitying urge to offer that the party may continue over coffee at her aunt’s home.
And Elinor Eastlake—referred to by the pet name “Lakey”, a moniker ridiculous enough to slip sideways, if you’re a sicko, into charming, sexy—finds Kay’s entire wedding a travesty. Kay’s pretension, in Lakey’s view, in marrying “in J.P. Morgan’s church” despite poor prospects, offends her only slightly less than the choice of groom. Lakey, “intellectual, impeccable, disdainful,” and “the Mona Lisa of the smoking room,” is the severe beauty around which the other girls orbited at school. “In private, they often discussed her, like toys discussing their owner.” Lately, Lakey has soured on Kay, an outsider she herself plucked from the crowd at Vassar and established within her moneyed clique. (“You used to like her best, Lakey. In your heart of hearts, I think you still do,” chides Dottie.) The other girls share in a sense that Kay, having not grown up amid the gilded festoonings of old money entitlement—about which the rest have some amount of embarrassment—can get carried away in her glorification of them. Only in Lakey does this clumsiness inspire disgust, maybe because she imagined Kay better. “Naturally, she had not explained any of this to Kay; she had expected Kay to feel it for herself, which was just what Kay couldn’t do and remain the blunt, natural, unconscious Kay they all loved.” Yet it is dour Lakey who quietly slips out to buy bags of rice with which to surprise the newlyweds as they’re seen off, fistfuls of grain raining down on the subway platform. “That’s banal! That’s not like you, Eastlake!” Kay shouts back across the turnstiles, thrilled. Lakey exits the narrative here to study art history in Paris. When World War II forces her return, she will do so, obviously, with a lesbian lover in tow.
When I first conceived of this column, I was grasping at the idea of fiction as a mirror, and interested in sitting anew with books that in some way helped me to see myself more clearly. While leery of overinvesting in the transformative power of art, it is true that throughout my life I have used, unconsciously and otherwise, novels to help expand and refine my definition of myself. “Books that Made Me Gay” is merely a series of words I thought could be memorable, if for nothing but the inducing of embarrassed winces. I did not need A Separate Peace to tell me I had something a bit funky going on in the sex and gender department. I was merely happy to have it. But if ever a book did truly thrust gayness upon me, it was The Group, this immensely pleasurable brick of becoming which ultimately, and improbably, posits lesbianism as one of the only safe paths for a woman in the world. Further, it includes this very funny and aspirational line: “It occurred to them all that Lakey, who had always been frightening and superior, would now look down on them for not being Lesbians.” (Always a capital L on Lesbian. On account of the Fear.)
The Group documents ordinary girls trying to figure out what sort of women they’ll be during an incredibly interesting political moment. “The most conservative among them, pushed to the wall, admitted that an honest socialist was entitled to a hearing.” Reading The Group in 2026, it’s hard not to think about how the field of acceptable ideas has been shrunk, willfully and with violence, in a century of that vaunted American progress. It seems unlikely, for one, that Polly’s once wealthy, still manic depressive father, would today become a hobbyist Trotskyite to fill his post-divorce days. Each quotidian incident echoes outward to join the story of a nation. Dottie has sex one time and flees to the desert and a mining tycoon. Dear Priss gives up the job she loved with the National Recovery Administration after multiple pregnancies end in miscarriage. When she births a living child, her doctor husband insists on implementing cutting edge parenting approaches, leaving Priss tormented as her son cries down the hall. One needn’t like self-aggrandizing gossip Libby McAusland to feel a wrench of horror as she instantly refashions a sexual assault into a fizzy anecdote. “When I turned him down, he tried to rape me! My new Bendel dress is in ribbons—did you like it?” After Harald has the stubbornly healthy Kay committed to a psychiatric hospital, her education cannot help her. “They were using psychology on her: it was not her own choice, and she was not free.” The only chapter that misfires is one following Hatton, the English butler in service to the family of Pokey Prothero. Hatton’s maniacal snobbery is amusing enough, but one does feel they’ve been ripped from the good stuff so that McCarthy can be cute. Pokey herself never takes center stage; busy flying her puddle jumper to and from veterinary school, Pokey is blissfully without social or economic introspection which could add to the chorus of her friends.
Though flagrant dykery is not enough to keep the girls from receiving their beloved Lakey back into the fold, they do titter amongst themselves about the “tragedy” which has “happened to Lakey.” The notion of lesbian sex induces terror. “Only Kay claimed to be able to picture their ‘embraces’ with equanimity.” They attempt to find comfort in imagining Lakey’s partner, Maria, the Baroness d’Estienne, as their innocent friend’s captor, only to run up against the truth of Lakey’s imperious majesty, her strength, in their memory, above all things. Certainly, it was just as likely Lakey who ensnared the widowed Maria. This duality, the conspicuous freedom within a romantic relationship outside the bounds of man-and-wife, the very idea that power dynamics could be complex and changeable and not determined purely by biological sex, freaks them out. “The fact that it was possible to reverse the relationship like an hourglass was what the girls found so troubling.”
It’s lesbianism, yes, and her literal escape from the frenzied promise of interwar America into the aesthetic splendor of the dying old world, but also her prioritizing of the mind over the material, her intellectual expansiveness and, frankly, her genuine snobbery that protects Lakey. She stands irreducible. Not all of the straight, married women in The Group are unhappy, but all have seen their visions of the future warped by the culture that raised them, the one that sent them off to Vassar for an education it would henceforth resent. When Harald, the simpering failure who beat and belittled Kay, sees Lakey at the funeral, he coughs out a flood of absurd entreaties, insisting he and Lakey are alike in their superiority over their simpleton peers. He is desperate to be told that Kay deserved all she got, to obscure his own cruelty by highlighting some essential flaw in his former wife. Elinor Eastlake needs only to invoke the specter of her power to erase his. She regrets how hard she was on Kay—“One was so callow then. I don’t like to think about it.”—and extracts from Harald a small recompense in leading him to wonder whether Lakey herself ever slept with Kay. His belligerent reaction obliterates all performance of sophistication. “Lakey was content; she had forced this dreadful man at last to be truthful; the fact that he revealed a hatred of ‘abnormality’ was only to be expected.” Leaving Harald to sputter obscenities on the highway’s hot shoulder, “Lakey smiled like a lizard.” She has returned home a hero of sorts, though she couldn’t save Kay. In escaping the varyingly depressing lives of her classmates, staying hot, studying art, getting pussy, Lakey represents an alternate way of being, a type of womanhood which does not necessitate subjugating one’s self to a man, nor the capitalist temples built in his image.
It is a relief to know that The Group stands flanked by paperback thrillers and diet guides on sagging, dusty bookshelves all across this world. There are many girls who haven’t met Lakey yet. And it’s not nothing, to me, to some, to certain travelers, at least, no, it’s not nothing, the hopeful knowledge that they still might.
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