It is an unconventional work, tracing the journey of a highly politicized young Catholic college graduate through various stages of emotional development, in unusually frank and revealing detail.
The story blends many themes that had marked the author’s own life, such as patriarchy, feminism, rebellion and betrayal, as expressed in her later autobiography, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957).
Margaret Sargent, protagonist of The Company She Keeps, closely resembles McCarthy’s account of herself in her later autobiography Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957).
[1]: 29 Because McCarthy travelled in prestigious literary circles, her characters have been traced as thinly veiled accounts of well-known intellectuals, such as Edmund Wilson and Philip Rahv.
[1]: 30 McCarthy has stated in interviews that the episode in the chapter “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt” really did happen, though she changed names and cities to retain a degree of anonymity.
[2]: 99–100 McCarthy put the stories together to form one collection and was adamant about calling it a novel, but her own formal experimentation intentionally obscures the continuity between episodes.
[6]: 102 In the earlier novel The Company She Keeps, this is evident in the final episode, as is McCarthy's tendency to write thinly veiled accounts of her personal affairs.
[7]: 87–88 Donohue suggests that McCarthy and many of her heroines, like Meg, are trapped between the intellectual and bohemian life of New York in the 1930s and 1940s, and the restrictive, traditional values and stereotypes of femininity found in the Catholic Church.
[8]: 925 Feminist literature of the time sought to synthesize Marx and Freud, and rework their sexist doctrines for contemporary feminism.
Her writing signals the beginning of a pushback against the Old Left by a younger generation of intellectuals, in part by taking a strong stance against Freudian psychiatry by aligning it with patriarchal subordination of female independence for fear that it would lead to madness.
Partisan Review originally published “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt,” but found the sex scene so controversial and immature that they refused to publish “The Genial Host.”[2]: 100 McCarthy’s husband Edmund Wilson, a prominent writer and critic, found the book ingenious, as did writer Vladimir Nabokov; however, most book reviewers were not as enthusiastic.