“Her prose is economical without being austere, witty without extravagance, tense and dramatic in its development from sentence to paragraph, clean as a chime.?.?. Her intelligence and learning are dazzling .?.?. defamatory brilliance.?.?.” –The New York Times

A vicious and brilliant satire of human vanity from the author of the classic bestseller The Group.

Mary McCarthy’s long-out-of-print second book satirizes the everyday struggles of a utopian commune seeking refuge after the destruction of the Second World War. It’s also a roman a clef in which she hardly troubles to disguise her characters–causing an explosion of outrage among the literary elite of the day, who did not fail to recognize themselves among her uncharitably, but all-too-accurately drawn portraits. McCarthy’s former lover, Philip Rahv, the model for the insufferably smug Will Taub, threatened a lawsuit. Diana Trilling called McCarthy “a thug.”

And it must be admitted: It is a cruel little book–”vicious, malicious, and nasty,” as McCarthy’s friend Dwight Macdonald wrote (after he, too, appeared in the book as Macdougal Macdermott). But it has outlasted its first detonation and can now be enjoyed for its aphoristic, cold-blooded dissection of the vanities of human endeavor.

All of which, by the way, is enhanced by the introduction from renowned essayist Vivian Gornick, tracing the influence of McCarthy on her generation of writers and thinkers.