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denly
in
the middle of a perfectly legitimate and sustained passion he
begins to employ the food-fad, animist idioms of a Californian Birchite.
But
this
is where we came in.
Jonathan Miller
AFTER THE DAISY CHAIN
THE GROUP. By Mary McCarthy. Harcourt, Brace and World. $5.95.
The heroines of Miss McCarthy's new novel are nine mem–
bers of the Vassar Class of '33-eight friends, Kay, Pokey, Helena,
Dottie, Lakey, Polly, Libbie, and Priss, who had roomed together
in
the South Tower of Main Hall, and one outsider, noisy Norine
Schmittlapp, who had envied them. The novel reports, records, reflects
(as in a mirror) a succession of events in their lives during the
seven years after graduation.
The Group
is very much a
public
novel: that is, it draws into
itself the texture of "real" life and society, the world outside the novel,
at the same time and in the same manner as it invents a "fictional"
life and society within the world of the novel itself. The former is
meant to support and reinforce the latter, to validate it as true. The
two kinds of life, "real" and "fictional," are so closely intermingled
that it becomes (the novelist hopes) impossible to distinguish between
them. Of course it must be borne in mind that something like this
happens in any novel- a woman can graduate from Vassar and get
married as plausibly in art as in life-but in the public novel the
confusion between art and life becomes an esthetic principle, a philosophy
and method of composition. As we have seen, Dottie Renfrew and
her mother (invented characters) meet for lunch at the Ritz (actual
hotel) in Boston. Why not the Bristol? Because there is no hotel of
that name in Boston. In the dining room of the Ritz, which Miss
McCarthy names but does not describe-the mere fact is sufficient for
her purpose-the Renfrew ladies partake not only of Ritz food but of
Ritz reality. We eat at the Ritz, therefore we exist. And the lunch
is
a fact that defines at the same time that it validates the invented
experience. Miss McCarthy is as alert to social discriminations as Saint–
Simon: if her method does not allow the Renfrews to have lunch in a
