[1] It tells the story of a group of embattled intellectuals, their quest to establish a Utopian community in the mountains of New England, and their failure to surmount ideological and personal differences for the greater good of the commune.

Doubling as a roman à clef, The Oasis borrows heavily from McCarthy's experiences and frustrations with the short lived European-American Group, and serves more broadly as a critique of the “abstract idealism of intellectuals”[2] and their inability to enact actual change.

Set in the near future following 1949, The Oasis depicts a group of 50 radical and liberal intellectuals who venture into the mountains of New England to create a shared living commune (aptly named, “Utopia”).

Macdermott dismisses the Realists as “revolutionary nihilists,” explaining, “They don’t know what they want… They’re so conservative they’re afraid of their own thoughts.”[5] After a short “lyrical period” of peace, prosperity, and basking in the pastoral quaintness of the commune, the Utopians begin to question the purpose of their project, and whether or not their mission serves a greater good.

Grand ambitions to contact congressmen, trade unionists, and newspapers dissolve into an effort to make a simple pamphlet, but this idea is also abandoned.

One day, the Taubs, Katy, and other members of the commune go strawberry picking on the outskirts of Utopia, only to find that a group of locals has beaten them to the site.

Katy, drunk, ends up lying in the grass in order to take in the pastoral setting, while Jim Haines, a “Lincoln-esque” magazine editor who is revered by all Utopians, begins to pack up his car to leave the commune, confirming Katy's worst suspicions that, “Ultimately, Utopia would fail.”[6] William Taub- Based on Philip Rahv, McCarthy's ex-lover and editor at The Partisan Review, Taub is the leader of the Realist faction of Utopia.

Macdougal Macdermott- Serving as a stand-in for Dwight Macdonald (a friend of McCarthy's and the founder of the magazine politics), Macdermott is the leader of the Purist faction.

Though Macdonald is not lampooned to the same degree that Rahv is, the character of Macdermott is hot-tempered, blindly committed to being consistent in his libertarian views, and susceptible to being roped into Taub's political chess match.

As many of the New York Intellectuals were formerly avowed Trotskyist Communists,[14] the group became attracted to the idea of retreating from society at large and participating in small-scale communal living.

Concerning the period immediately following the war, McCarthy would later remark: “It seemed possible still, utopian but possible, to change the world on a small scale.”[15] That summer, McCarthy and her fellow New York Intellectuals, under the guidance of activist Nicola Chiaromonte, established the European-American Group (EAG) in an effort to create “human-scaled, grassroots, transnational communities of dialogue and solidarity.” This effort towards small-scale living, however, was short lived.

Soon after its founding, the EAG disbanded “due to a lack of internal consensus about its goals,” as “the Macdonald-McCarthy-Chiaromonte faction” failed to find common ground with the so-called “Partisan Review Boys,” Philip Rahv and William Phillips.

[17] Only a few years later, in the spring of 1949, McCarthy—along with Dwight Mcdonald, Elizabeth Hardwick, Sidney Hook, and other former EAG members—would help disrupt a communist conference held at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

Its deliciously witty sentence structure is rooted in the heartfelt disappointment of a moralist whom the reader feels has really wanted the good (that is, the genuine) in our midst to prevail.”[30]