---
product_id: 910192
title: "The Group"
brand: "mary mccarthy"
price: "€ 36.00"
currency: EUR
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 9
url: https://www.desertcart.es/products/910192-the-group
store_origin: ES
region: Spain
---

# The Group

**Brand:** mary mccarthy
**Price:** € 36.00
**Availability:** ✅ In Stock

## Quick Answers

- **What is this?** The Group by mary mccarthy
- **How much does it cost?** € 36.00 with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
- **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.es](https://www.desertcart.es/products/910192-the-group)

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## Description

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## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5.0 out of 5 stars







  
  
    Three Million Strong and Counting
  

*by A***G on Reviewed in the United States on May 5, 2015*

McCarthy's brainchild spans seven years in the lives of eight Vassar graduates of varying means and intellectual candle power, from their graduation in 1933 and their settling in New York City, to the eve of American involvement in World War Two.  It is much to Mary McCarthy's credit, I think, that the book with its large cast does not pretend to have "the last word" about how to cope with the Depression and its economic dislocations, with men, or with life in general.  The closest thing to a central character, Kay, is presumably the one who will have the world by the tail, but hers is a saga of increasing loss, betrayal and bitterness beginning with her training as a sales clerk at R.H. Macy and her marriage to a superficially appealing but ineffectual and selfish man.  The smartest and most fashionable character, Lakey, disappears into Europe for most of the book, thoughtfully remembering to send stunning wedding presents, then returns to America toward the end of the book with a surprise in tow.  One of the women is accidentally shunted to the mental ward of a prestigious hospital, and if not for the physician husband of a fellow Group member, might have had to fight her way out.  Another one, Pokey, is so fortunate as to live in a rich family barely affected by the Depression, which offers a delightful, Jeevesian portrait of a rich family run on auto-pilot by a super-efficient butler.  The men are a mixed bag:  the appropriately named Dick makes sexual inroads among the unmarried of the Group but disappears when they marry.  Harald Petersen, Kay's husband, is a would-be playwright employed marginally in the theater and enough to sidetrack any spouse's dreams.  Other men, being less of the jerk, provide less drama but are discussed.I think it fair to say that THE GROUP embodies some of the feminist outlook of THE FEMINIST MYSTIQUE and the smart-woman's viewpoint in novel form of THE BELL JAR (all three books were first published in 1963 but THE BELL JAR was not available to American readers until 1967).  What is difficult to convey is McCarthy's polished writing, which slips in and out of satire (and sometimes, when her characters speak with internal monologue, are just 'unreliable' enough in their narration that we reader know what's going on better than the narrator does).  "Sardonic" is often the word used to describe McCarthy's writing in this book, and while it is crisp (sometimes to the point of being knife-like), it is not really a particular send-up or lampoon of any Depression-era class or of the Thirties themselves.I was astonished that one reviewer here opined that the reader "MUST be scholarly and well finished in the all of the arts, and several foreign languages, to understand the subtleties."  Gentle reader, I counted three instances of French:  "crepe de chine" to describe a dress collar, "faiblesse" which means weakness, and "mauvaise fille" (bad girl).  Other than a line of Dante one character's father spouts, that is it for foreign languages.  Considering that McCarthy could have inflicted much worse on us, including Yiddish and German, we got off easily.  She wanted this book to be read, and it was.At times, the troubles faced by these women, the deteriorating economy, parental calls to "come home" (and abandon NYC) and the vagaries of spousal moods, bottle-feeding and child-rearing, did seem to have a distinct "Thirties" cast.  This is, after all, social history in the form of a novel, and contemporary politics as well as the New Deal's "alphabet soup" agencies are discussed.  But then I run across a passage like this where Priss muses about her physician husband Sloan and wonder if things have really changed that much at all:  "There was a side of Sloan, she had decided, that she mistrusted, a side that she summed up by saying he was a Republican.  Up to now this had not mattered; most men she knew were Republicans--it was almost part of being a man.  But she did not like the idea of a Republican controlling the destiny of a helpless baby..."THE GROUP has sold three million copies with more in store.  In the Sixties, writers of substance often wrote substantial novels that also became very popular.  I recommend THE GROUP.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4.0 out of 5 stars







  
  
    Clever, perceptive, surprising, and loveable
  

*by K***R on Reviewed in the United States on February 26, 2022*

My two favorite things about this book were (1) for a book that satirizes a privileged class, the characters were often surprisingly loveable.  The novel moves between different characters' points of view, and even the least admirable or most self-deluded among the protagonists developed some endearing qualities when the narrative switched to their perspective.  And (2) I really enjoyed how I kept being surprised by the characters' sudden flashes of self-awareness. Just when they seemed to be heading blindly in the most wrong-headed direction, they would recognize the way they were being used or their own mixed motives or their friends' hypocrisies.  They would be naive, or have poor judgment, or let themselves be bullied or manipulated, then correctly diagnose the problem, but that extra layer of self-knowledge rarely extricated them from their difficulties.Oh, and a 3rd thing is that for all their cross-currents of resentment or snobbery, there was an underlying  loyalty between the main characters - they aren't 2-dimensional WASP-y cardboard characters, nor are they sticky-sweet bffs.  They belong in a middle zone of the educationally precocious yet ridiculously naive, sometimes heartless and sometimes warm-hearted, entitled and impoverished, conventional and utterly strange--this fine balance that could constantly tip one way or the other is part of what makes the novel so compelling.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5.0 out of 5 stars







  
  
    The group
  

*by E***E on Reviewed in the United States on July 27, 2023*

A book that was ahead of its time

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*Product available on Desertcart Spain*
*Store origin: ES*
*Last updated: 2026-02-21*