Oasis: A Novel

Description

Mary McCarthy's second book satirises the everyday struggles of a utopian commune seeking refuge after the destruction of the Second World War. She hardly troubles to disguise her characters, which caused an explosion of outrage among the literary elite of the day, who did not fail to recognise themselves among her uncharitably, but all-too-accurately drawn portraits. It must be admitted: It is a cruel book. But it has outlasted its first detonation and can now be enjoyed for its aphoristic, cold-blooded dissection of the vanities of human endeavour.

MARY MCCARTHY was born in Seattle on June 21, 1912. When her parents died in 1918 she was deposited with relations, as memorialized in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, into ''circumstances of almost Dickensian cruelty and squalor." She later lived with Philip Rahv, whose Partisan Review she joined in 1937, and married eminent critic Edmund Wilson in 1938, the second of four marriages. Her scandalous, 1963 novel The Group spent two years on the New York Times bestseller list. Appalled by the book, Vassar College tried to revoke her degree. She died October 25, 1989 at New York Hospital. VIVIAN GORNICK is the author of many books, including The End of the Novel of Love, a National Book Critic's Circle Award finalist, Fierce Attachments: A Memoir, and The Men in My Life. She teaches writing at The New School.

"Quite possibly the cleverest woman America has ever produced." -Time "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 "Brilliant and true and funny and beautifully written and intelligently thought and felt." -Cyril Connolly "Miss McCarthy earned recognition for her cool, analytic intelligence and her exacting literary voice-a voice capable of moving from the frivolously feminine to the willfully cerebral, from girlish insouciance to bare-knuckled fury." -Michiko Kakutani "Pure delight...a veritable little masterpiece." -Hannah Arendt "The she-intellect supreme... The First Lady of American letters."-Newsweek "Mary's smile is very famous. It's not what it seems at all. It's a rather sharkish smile. When most pretty girls smile at you, you feel terrific. When Mary smiles at you, you look to see if your fly is open." -Dwight McDonald "She thoroughly believed in offending people. She believed in provocation as incitement to thought, to reform, to life itself."-Arthur Schlessinger Jr.