Fiction January 1, 1

The jacket copy for Joanna Smith Rakoff’s A Fortunate Age compares the book to Mary McCarthy’s The Group; in the acknowledgments, the author calls it “an homage” to that 1963 novel. Neither reference prepares the reader for what follows: a scene-by-scene replay of McCarthy’s work. Rakoff recapitulates The Group’s plot and characters with painstaking, near-compulsive devotion.