It’s because it’s the land of the loner that the United States is so loved or loathed. Yet to me the most beguiling novels that have zipped across the Atlantic in the past half-century or so are mostly about groups, specifically groups on campus, usually a rather classy campus at that. Mary McCarthy’s Group were at Vassar; Donna Tartt’s The Secret History is set in an elite liberal arts college in Vermont. Even The Catcher in the Rye, though legendary as a portrait of moody adolescence, is also a brilliant picture of life at the sort of college Salinger himself went to.
But no novelist I can think of has majored on the group portrait with quite such verve, wit and sympathy as Meg Wolitzer. Her previous novel, The Interestings (2014), followed the lives of a self-adoring clique at a socialist summer camp. The Ten-Year Nap (2008) tracked four New York friends who have just woken up from a decade of getting married and having babies. The Position (2005), perhaps the funniest of them, recounts the fractured life stories of the Mellow children, whose super-liberal parents wrote a runaway bestseller called Pleasuring, which featured tasteful pastel illustrations of their lovemaking.
Wolitzer’s latest excursion into the promises and pitfalls of liberation begins at Ryland, a rather dim college in southern Connecticut. Greer Kadetsky, an idealistic freshman, is bewitched by a lecture given by Faith Frank, the irresistible doyenne of old-style feminism, and she follows this elegant and compelling guru through the struggles of her later years. Like many Wolitzer characters, Greer and her best friend Zee Eisenstat believe that they were born to save the world, and are repeatedly puzzled when they discover how reluctant the world is to be saved and how full it is of obnoxious characters like the serial groper Darren Tinzler.
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