Mary McCarthy is my 1930s soul sister. She was a hussy of incomparable wit with a somewhat tragic past (orphaned by the Spanish flu pandemic, sent to live with a sadistic aunt). All the reviews of this book mention it as her succès de scandale because of her habits in the bedroom, but if published today I'd imagine her Trotskyism would garner more attention. At any rate, it's not her objectionable behavior that makes the stories good, but instead her clever characters. My favorite story was probably "Rogue's Gallery," about her time employed as the stenographer for a con-man gallery owner and the friendship that grew between them. And at the risk of sounding bitter, I loved her cynical sketches of men in relationships, particularly in "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt" (cross-country train affair!) and "Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man" (oh snap! this story is such a good burn!). At this point I've already got her best known work, The Group, her "intellectually rigorous" correspondence with Hannah Arendt, and one of her biographies queued up at the library. Will let you know how they turn out. ( )

too bitter, too analytical and too detached. I felt as if I were reading henry James for the 20th century. having said that it provided a fascinating contemporary view of the mid-century period I love so much: the final chapter was almost like reading what is going through Donald Draper's wife's mind when she is sent for psychiatric counselling. also interesting to read about american being socialist and communist before (the other) McCarthy ie quite openly, and with a great deal of intellectually sincere intentions, and to compare them with Doris Lessing's depiction of British Communists (of the same period?) in Golden Notebook. From the same school of writing as that book too. possibly because of the style, possibly because of the feeling that I was missing out too often on cultural subtleties I simply don't get or because the McCarthy deliberately intended her readers to struggle with engaging with the protaganist I just couldn't get emotionally excited about it. ( )

This was a very interesting book, and one I'll definitely have to read again. It took a good two months, because of school, so I'd like to read it in a week or so, without all the breaks. Some of it was very confusing; it changes so much from chapter to chapter that I would find myself loving it after one chapter, and not wanting to go on when I started the next. It seemed a little disconnected at times, but overall I think it works all right.

I didn't like the last chapter that much - a psychoanalytical look at Margaret Sargent's life, with a lot of obvious connections to Mary McCarthy's own childhood that hadn't been so apparent throughout the rest of the book. ( )

If you like clever conversation, thoroughly laced with the left-wing politics of the late 30s, this is the book for you. It’s a series of interconnected short stories, set at various points in the life of Margaret Sargent. She’s one of the most self-aware people you’ll ever meet. She shares not just her thoughts, but her judgments of her thoughts, and the reasons behind these judgments.

At the same time, McCarthy only occasionally over-writes. The point of view shifts, and often we see her through the eyes of her lovers, or in glancing and circumstantial ways. Everyone in this book is subject to the same detailed, scrupulous understanding, and it’s always interesting. Everything also happens in a very acutely noted social context. In some of the stories, the intellectual climate of the times pays as vivid a part as any other character.
( )

As I was reading this book I kept referring to this summary on the back page. The fact that I was reading a novel about someone named Margaret Sargent was not something I could infer from the text. It seemed to me that I was reading a collection of disparate short stories, and yes, there was a young female wandering through each of these stories, but it wasn't at all clear that it was the same young female each time. It was as though her story was obscured by the dark, and the author randomly flicked on the light and illuminated some part of it, and this part may span a single evening, a few days or a number of years. But random is the operative word here; there was only the vaguest sense of a sequence, an ordering that could only be understood retrospectively, and no real narrative. Continued ( )