"Like the classic novel it so obviously pays homage to, Mary McCarthy’s The Group, Rakoff’s mesmerizing debut opens with a wedding and closes with a funeral. In between, the novel provides a pitch-perfect portrait of the generation that came of age in the 1990s as four ambitious Oberlin graduates arrive in New York City full of hopes and dreams. They include native New Yorker Sadie, a book editor who is the most emotionally stable member of the group; Emily, a talented actress who can’t catch a break; Lil, a brainy doctoral student given to intense bouts of insecurity; and Beth, still in love with her musician boyfriend from college. As Rakoff depicts how the arts-loving group very slowly morphs into adulthood, ultimately weighed down by the same concerns as their 'bourgeois' parents, she acerbically sends up the time’s complicated politics, which dictate that eating a cheeseburger is an immoral act, and self-serving attitudes toward wealth. Yet she also invests the group’s life choices and mistakes with a real sense of urgency, casting the postcollegiate years as a kind of crucible that only the strong survive. If this smart, thoroughly absorbing novel recalls The Group, it also recalls the seminal work of Anne Beattie in the seventies and Jay McInerney in the eighties. Like them, Rakoff captures a certain time and place with heartbreaking clarity." —Booklist (starred)
