Books: Eight to Beware

• Share

THE GROUP by Mary McCarthy, 378 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $5.95.

Eight little Vassar girls competing hard

for heaven

Payne Whitney got one, and then there were seven.

Mary McCarthy's novel The Group, 20 years in the writing, has been signaled by a first printing of 75,000 copies, and for the first time, highbrow readers who have long acknowledged an athletic and logical brain will meet those who prefer the fictional products of female temperament.

Apparently just a novel that begins with a Vassar lady's marriage and ends with a Vassar lady's funeral, with a great deal of pre-and postcoital psychologizing in between, The Group is also tough-minded sociology, in which men will find hints of a matriarchal Mafia, which makes its headquarters at Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

The Tribal Rites. In any case, Mary McCarthy, Vassar '33, brings an insider's view to a U.S. social phenomenon unique in the English-speaking world: the college-educated woman who stays "college-centered" in a way that English upper-class boys are fixed in patterns by their public schools. The Group is a pioneer work in the anthropology of this female tribe. It describes its initiation ceremonies, its tribal rites, its system of punishment for deviation. Its appeals are neither to God nor to what used to be called prophetically "mere man," but to the group opinion of the initiated.

The Group is also a compendium of period ideas (the '30s) in politics, interior decoration, sex, art, child care and the management of husbands. There is Libby, devoutly literary; Dottie, the only Bostonian at Vassar who is not identifiable by tweed; Helena, impeccably educated from birth by a cultivated clubwoman mother; Polly, whose father has gone "loony" after the crash of '29; Kay, beautiful and serious, most responsive to the conscience of The Group; Priss, hereditary Vassar, destined for social work; Pokey, rich and horsy; Lakey, "the Mona Lisa of the Smoking Room," who has everything. Rich, beautiful and haughty, Lakey has a taste in clothes, people and ideas that is absolute.

First Casualty. Soon, indeed, they have "snazzy" jobs and "spiffy" apartments. Kay is the first to acquire a husband, from whom she may confidently expect "vicarious success." The Group gathers at church to handicap the groom, said to be a genius in the theater. "Not bad," says Pokey, the society girl. Lakey knows better, and Lakey, as always, is right. Kay's husband has sexual shortcomings, and little success. Kay has a breakdown, is sort of tricked by her unsatisfactory consort into Payne Whitney, New York Hospital's great psychiatric clinic.