When was the last time you read a novel that you wished was 100 pages longer?
That was my reaction when I reached page 320 of J. Courtney Sullivan’s wonderful first novel, “Commencement” (Knopf). I wanted more of the adventures of Celia, Bree, Sally and April — four very different young women who become the closest of friends during their four years together at Smith College.
Sullivan originally modeled the book on “The Group,” Mary McCarthy’s account of a group of Vassar College women during the 1930s. That popular novel was a much drier and more cynical account of life during and after college — you could feel the slight contempt McCarthy had for the giddy students and then her satisfaction with their various forms of comeuppance.
“Commencement” is a more affectionate look at women in and out of college around the turn of the century. Sullivan satirizes some of her character’s preoccupations but you can tell she likes all of them; perhaps the fact that Sullivan chose to write this book only a few years out of Smith herself makes the identification factor much stronger than it was for McCarthy who had been out of college for three decades when she wrote “The Group.”
Sullivan has fun with some of the stereotypes at Smith: “Lara was what Celia called a conveyor belt lesbian, by which she meant one of the dozens of girls on campus whose sexuality was evidenced through their short, spiky hair, bodies either spindly or massive (never anything in between), and a uniform of white tank tops over cargo shorts, as if they had all been mass-produced in a factory somewhere in New Jersey.”
The social comedy aspects of “Commencement” are mixed with harrowing accounts of date rape and April’s post-graduate life as a feminist fighting sex trafficking. Sullivan manages to mix these elements without ever seeming facile or undermining the book’s very wise account of the special nature of friendships in college and the challenges these bonds face out in the “real world.”
