`STEW NOVELS Nothing But the Facts, Ma'am The Group. By
Mary McCarthy. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 18s.) How should one set about writing novels, now that the cinema has taken over the popular narra- tive techniques, and radio and television do all the best reporting? Anyone who attempts a novel today is forced to ask himself, sooner or later, whether the damned thing wouldn't be better in another medium. As Mary McCarthy remarked in a recent essay, many of the writers we think of as modern novelists in fact stopped writing novels quite early on in their careers. She in- stanced Gide, D. H. Lawrence, Malraux, Camus and Orwell: 'starting as novelists, they fled, as it were, in all directions from the tyranny of the novelist's specialisation : into politics, diary- keeping, travel and travel-writing, war, art history,' journalism, "engaga Tient." ' Yet the novel remains as the greatest challenge : 'we are all in flight from the novel and yet drawn back to it, as to some unfinished and problematical relationship.'
Drawn back from (at least) politics, travel and travel-writing, art, history, and journalism, McCarthy returns in The Group to her un- finished relationship with the novel, whose ex- cellent critic she is. That the relationship has always been- problematical is clear enough from her own statements about her work. All her novels are romans a clefs to a greater or lesser extent, and her passion for facts ('the distinctive mark of the novel is its concern with the actual World, the world of fact, of the verifiable, of figures, even, and statistics') only emphasises how little she strays from literal truth in her descrip-
tions. This doesn't mean she has no imagina- tion—only that she imagines from the firmest possible basis of realism. The boundary between fiction and autobiography in her work has always been disputed.
McCarthy's special gifts as a writer are her incisiveness—her implacable scorn for and devastating exposure of human weaknesses—and her concentration. In The Group she has taken eight Vassar room-mates, Class of '33, and one outsider, and subjected them to a series of de- tailed close-ups over some eight years. Vassar is famous for its blue-stockinged individualists, sadly conforming to type in their eagerness to be different. These nine girls, though, have little in common except their age-group. The novel moves' episodically forward as one or another has first sex, buys her first pessary, gets her first job, makes her first marriage. The girls have babies, endure pediatric theories, agonise over toilet-training, divorce, breakdown, re-marry, commit suicide. Each episode is minutely realised in the McCarthy manner, with the men coming out of it particularly badly, everyone humiliated, and the reader wincing as he laughs. It's all ex- tremely clever, in the nasty sense as well as the nice one, and page by page it's, as one might expect, brilliant.
But—and it would be absurd to judge McCarthy by any but her own high standards— both the group and the novel lack any true centre or direction. One is never shown the girls at Vassar, and there is strangely little feeling be- tween them if they really were such a groupy group as is suggested: as a result, there is no real link between the episodes. In this, if in. no other way, it's all a bit like Cranford (yet one feels sure that McCarthy is capable of an Emma). One feels each episode must belong to some overall structure, to some whole of which it is only a part : but there is no structure, no whole. Everything in The Group is almost fanati- cally well-observed, yet a novel isn't only veri- fiable facts and figures, and one has the sense of something having been left out. Each episode is brilliant, but all the episodes don't add up to a brilliant novel. The final effect is curiously like the parodied Class Notes of the Vassar Alumnae Magazine, very readable, but somehow almost meaningless: Mary McCarthy's relation- ship with the novel remains unfinished and
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