The Sigla Blog

Last week, after a break of over a year, I took the plunge and joined another book group. As I explained to Ryan Tubridy on Monday, there are lots of good reasons in getting together with a group of people to talk books. Apart from consolidating old friendships, in that you get to meet up regularly, there’s the chance to get to know others better. Everyone’s so busy these days, that having a specific reason to meet up with people you want to see more of and the motivation to read and finish a book, is a great enticement to doing something different on a night out. Reading is a solitary experience. In a book group, you get not just one, but several perspectives on a work and invariably you discover something new you may have missed along the way. Being in a bookgroup, for me, is a bit like exercise; having to read a book regularly actually encourages you to read more outside of the group.

Women have always shared, confessed, confided and while no one in the group stated that they wanted membership to be explicitly all-women, it just turned out that way. And hey, where else can you talk openly about nipples, circumcision and other stuff I probably shouldn’t mention? While reading groups are predominantly all-female, there are plenty of male and mixed groups. Two recent winners of the Penguin Reader’s Group Prize include two all-male groups: the Racketeers, who meet in their local pub, and High Down Prison Reading Group, who were visited by Nick Hornby (they read A Long Way Down) as part of their prize.

Our first book was Mary McCarthy’s The Group. Written in the 1960s and set in the 1930s, it follows the lives of eight US college women in New York, cataloguing their aspirations and experiences. I figured that a book about a group of women being read by a group of women in another lifetime, country and culture might throw up some interesting questions. That and the fact that it covers marriage, politics, sexuality, children, infidelity, class, careerism, lesbianism and breast-feeding, among other things. McCarthy is thought to have clashed with several friends who are thinly disguised as characters in the book. As social history, it’s fascinating, not least for numerous passages about contraception, from methods to procurement and the sexual ethics of using them - especially when you’re not married or are having an affair. One enlightened hitched lady is described as having “pessaries all over town, like a sailor with a girl in every port”.

The women of the book, all of a particular class, have either blinkered or prejudiced attitudes to the less well off and despite the negative portrayal of most of the men in the book, McCarthy still allows the male characters to posit some of the book’s most interesting theories. Certainly these women have autonomy (unbelievably so if you were to compare them to their Irish contemporaries of the time) but none of them are as in control of their lives as they’d liked to presume. Kay, is not as liberated within her marriage as she thinks, Dottie’s deflowering has a tragi-comic feel about it; Libby, who works in publishing, is said to have “sentimental” taste in books for liking Virginia Woolf; while Norine justifies a friend’s husband affair with her as him asserting his masculinity. It’s a strongly character-driven work, heavy on dialogue, but McCarthy’s real gift is in allowing her characters to reveal themselves - and even more so, other characters - through interior monologues.

The book was also difficult to get hold off - cue frantic purchases online and me rediscovering the library. Now with Dublin Public libraries, you can obtain a pin number and login online to renew books and - this is the best bit - search the entire archive to find a book (it’ll tell you the branches that have it and whether it’s on shelf or on loan). So I’m back to the land of what one of the other girl’s boyfriends called ‘the cackling coven’, although I think wine consumption might have something to do with that tag.

Next up, T has chosen Jon McGregor’s If No One Speaks of Remarkable Things. Other books on the go this week include Rachel Seiffert’s new book Afterwards and Daphne Du Maurier’s The Birds.