The reasons why I'm enjoying The Group

That amazing thing about Mary McCarthy's 1963 novel, The Group - a long novel much of which in involves chapter-length conversations between women and their mothers or their best friends about such topics as contraception, breast-feeding, and marital infidelity, in which all of the men (possibly one exception, the literary editor) turn out to be boors or creeps or worse and in which the women are generally under-employed, unappreciated daughters of white privilege (ca. 1935) - is how much I enjoy reading this book, which on the surface would seem so out of my orbit: I am not part of the target demographics, as we'd say today. Why am I reading it?: First of all MMcM is great at creating character, not through tedious back story but through sharp dialog and interaction with other characters; second, her topical descriptions are fantastic, building a setting, such as an apartment one of the members of The Group (Vassar 33) has rented, by fastidious attention to detail, but all w/ a point, the setting is informative about the characters; third, a great ear for dialog, and the dialog is witty without being self-conscious - it always seems as if the intelligent characters are speaking, not the narrator or author imposing he voice on the narrative; fourth, a smart attention to a time long past, even at the time of composition and more so today, that yet still feels alive and present - not some quaint historical fiction depending on a bunch of topical references, rather it's about young women in their time and struggling for freedom and independence, while still lheld back by the conventions of their day and their class; and fifth, it's a great feminist statement that's smart enough to stand back from the characters, not making them heroic necessarily (each of the group members has a mix of traits, some more conventional than others) but credible, privileged, and each tragic in her way - as we look back from now and to a degree even from 1963 we see how these intelligent women were born too soon, each stifled by the expectations of class, family, husband.