The Interestings

A Lifetime of Friendship, Love, and Disappointment

Probably most of us of a certain age and background have never been to an away summer camp for an entire summer. What a magical experience it appears: to meet new people; to be seen differently; to see yourself differently; to see new possibilities for yourself; and to establish friendships that survive for a lifetime. So, from the outset, Meg Wolitzer's novel of friendship, love, and, as is often the case with life, disappointment, captivates from the beginning. From start to poignant conclusion, you'll find it a thoroughly enjoyable experience.

Succinctly, the novel maps the lives of adolescents who meet at the Spirit-in-the-Woods summer camp and dub themselves The Interestings, because show more that's how they see each other. The main characters who form the core of the novel, the people you'll find yourself caring most about, are the "poor" girl from Long Island, Julie Jacobson, who gets renamed Jules and discovers a new, unimagined potential for her life; Ash Wolf, a girl possessing ephemeral beauty and theatrical ambitions; and Ethan Figman, a gnome of a fellow from a difficult home that he copes with using an enormous talent for animation. Supporting characters who comprise the rest of the group include Ash's attractive but irresponsible brother Goodman; Cathy Kiplinger, a girl physically mature for her age who desires a dancing career; and Jonah Bay, whose mother Susannah is a famous but fading folk star. There are numerous others, parents, husbands, other friends, abusers, children, pretty much everything real life tosses your way from childhood to the doorstep of old age. But these are the three who get the most page time and the three you'll care most about, and who provide quite an emotional ending.

As you might guess, life does not work out as any of the three and the others had hoped in summer camp, not just professionally, but personally and emotionally, too. Life has a way of surprising us. Some surprises are good, though usually mixed with troubles. Other surprises are not so good, and some horrible. So it is for The Interestings, a long and winding road that doesn't always cooperate in fulfilling dreams, but that cannot destroy what holds Jules, Ash, and Ethan together: their friendship with and love for each other, not even, in the end, death.

This friendship among the three principals is not without some huge challenges of the sort that end not only friendships but marriages, too. If you've ever felt envy for a friend who has achieved something you yourself has wanted and striven for, you'll immediately identify with Jules. And, if you've loved unreturned, and nurtured that unrequited love over a lifetime, you'll understand Ethan's feelings, while also experiencing the ending more deeply.

Recommended as an engaging journey through interesting lives, and for Wolitzer's skillfulness in blending the story into the issues of the last quarter of the 20th century, and for making the lives of her people feel real.

If you're old enough, Wolitzer's novel, especially the opening in a summer camp, will immediately bring to mind the wonderful Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk. Wouk, now in his hundreds and still writing, is a master storyteller and Marjorie Morningstar is among his most popular novels. Like Jules, Marjorie Morgenstern aspires to a life in the theater. She falls madly for Noel Airman, pursues him, while maintaining a friendship with the man who really loves her, Wally Wronken. You might enjoy it. show less

This is a coming-of-age story that lasts into middle age. Julie (Jules) Jacobsen attends Spirit in the Woods camp for art-y students the summer she turns 15 (and the summer of Watergate) and her life is forever changed. Never one of the "cool" kids in her life at home, she is immediately included in the "cool" group at camp, the Interestings, anchored by brother and sister Goodman and Ash Wolf and evened up as 3 boys and 3 girls: Jonah Bay, a talented musician and son of a famous folk singer, Ethan Figman, an animator who goes on to Simpsons-style success by age 25, and Cathy Kiplinger, a beautiful, busty dancer. This first summer they are only shades of who they will become and there is the predictable coupling over the next 3 summers show more they return. The only couple that sticks is the most unlikely: goofy Ethan and the beautiful, refined, rich Ash. Jules finds herself a constant centerpoint between them; she is the best girlfriend to Ash, and vice-versa, and Ethan always loved Jules first -- there is a deep best-friend comfort between them that supersedes both their marriages. The summers are idyllic and the friends often meet up in NYC through the school year, but when Goodman and Cathy become a couple, the Interestings bust apart. Cathy accuses Goodman of rape and his resulting reaction becomes a shadow they all live under well into adulthood. Wolitzer does a nice job of providing backstory for the main characters as well as following all the individuals into adulthood, both on their own and as a group. No thread is left to ravel. Jules tries to make it as a comic actress in NYC, and Ash also pursues the theatre with better results, in part due to money and influence. Ethan is a runaway success and Jonah abandons music for MIT and a career in engineering. Cathy and Goodman are out of the picture, for the most part, though they linger in the collective memory of the group and also make unexpected appearances at unexpected times. By her thirties, Jules is married to solid, nice-guy, not-artsy Dennis, who still fits in well with the crowd and she has abandoned the stage for a career as a social worker. As lives take predictable arcs, through careers, marriage, children, the friendship persists, and morphs to fit the stage of life. I liked the author's detached tone, verging on snarky, and mostly from Jules' point of view. It is honest and poignant and raises some great questions about art and success and friendship and envy. Jules is a smart and self-aware woman and as such is able to see the pitfalls of this sometimes toxic friendship as well as keep her own life fairly grounded. She says in one of the camp summers: "When you looked closely at something, you could almost faint...but you had to look closely if you wanted any knowledge at all in life." Sometimes Jules sees things with crystal clarity, sometimes she misses the big picture, and sometimes she is blind to the pervasive influence the Interestings have had on her life, but still she looks and that examination is worth hearing about. show less

The Interestings centers on Jules, Ash, Ethan, Goodman and Jonah; a group of teenagers who meet at a summer camp for the artistically gifted in the mid-1970's. Though their backgrounds and talents are varied, their time at the camp creates a bond that will keep them together throughout the stages of adulthood.

It starts simply, with dry wit as the campers develop the ironic banter that will become standard through their early friendship. What seems like the familiar, awkward camp story is actually a delicate framework for the detailed relationships that will grow between the characters.

When Ethan and Ash find success well beyond what any of their friends could have imagined, their lifestyle beings to set them apart. It is here, as the show more group journeys through adulthood, where Wolitzer's talent begins to stand out. She is able to walk her characters through seemingly endless themes, namely the dynamics of friendship and envy, without making them appear fantastical or sending them down stereotypical paths. When I was worried it might bend, she made sure the character framework she created early on held strong and added beautiful dialogue to boot.

Wolitzer also manages to jump between time periods and points of view in such an amazingly natural way. Where I've been frustrated with this technique from other authors, The Interestings has this constant flow of life that could very easily be hard to follow if not done right.

When I was finished reading the last sentence, I let out this half whimper/half sigh and set my Kindle down for a few minutes. I went back and read all 16 of my highlights and then pre-ordered a physical copy. I highly suggest you do the same - whimper and sigh are optional. show less

I deeply wanted to like this, especially because Jeffrey Eugenides is a big fan, and I am a diehard Eugenides acolyte. For the first 30 pages, I was rapturous about the book. And, to be fair, I felt something at the end. But, in between.

SO MUCH PLOT.

Six young people spend a summer at camp together, and go on to live interconnected but wildly different lives. Some end in tragedy, some in muted success, others somewhere in between. Wollitzer's prose swirls in a chronologically confused but always comprehensible manner from the 1970s to the end of the 2000s. Her characters all inhabit comfortably bourgeois lives (theatre director, psychologist, and so on) and face bourgeois problems with their parents, marriages, and children. It's all show more reasonable. But...

SO MUCH PLOT.

To be fair, there are lots of people who love plot. They gag for it. The kind of people who devour daytime soap operas or read fantasy novels. There's nothing wrong with that. But I'm realising as I age that it's not for me. Plot is wonderful. It can be very engaging in, for instance, a classic mystery novel. But I have my threshold, and Wollitzer reached it before chapter 5. The novel rarely breaks for a moment of atmosphere, colour, or nuance. It's all meetings, conversations, and swift life changes.

Look, it is not a reviewer's job to disagree with what an author chose to do. It's to assess whether they did it successfully. And my problem with the torrential cascades of plot is simply that it deprives us of the most basic of literary adages: "show, don't tell". That's not always good advice, but here it may have been. A fortysomething man who was a stud in his teens has lost his charisma, but doesn't realise it. How do we know? Because the narrative voice tells us. And fair enough, too; there's no time for us to realise it from character or situation, because any given scene only takes one or two pages. There's too much plot, and not enough time. Characters fall in love, fall apart, have depressive episodes, deal with children with disabilities or other crises, soar to the height of their career unexpectedly, change jobs, lament their past life, unintentionally cause divorces, commit alleged rape, are weirdly groomed by older musicians, discover themselves, doubt themselves. Veering between timelines is a clever technique, but it just contributes to Wollitzer's need to keep updating us with chronologies and details that leave us panting with exhaustion. In other words:

SO MUCH PLOT.

Conversely, despite this being a chunky book with lots of plot, dialogue rarely packs a punch. Conversations are functional, people speak just like the rest of us do, and concerns are rarely elevated to literary levels. War and Peace it ain't. Moreso, there's an argument to be made that aside from Jules, the central character, no-one really changes that much. They remain types, and we never dig down.

While I felt an indescribable angst while reading the final chapter, in which unsurprisingly Jules meditates on life, loss, age, and change, I'm not even sure it was because of the author. It was just that inevitable yearning that we all feel when confronted with thoughts of our own past and that endless question of what we have gained with age, but what we have lost. It was empathy by default that I was feeling.

I continue to wish that I could have appreciated this more. show less

I've been too depressed to really do anything these last couple months, reading included. But at the confluence of train delays and burgeoning alcoholism, progress was made.

This book could make a humanist out of a misanthrope. Not through soppy positivity, romance, or vacant platitudes, but something altogether more subtle and a mysterious. Like watching a sunrise over the inner city, or looking out an aeroplane window at night, the weight of humanity in all of its bland splendour happening everywhere you look can feel almost overwhelming.

We are all interesting. Both considered as a whole, and individually. In the way that only very good literature can, this book is a reminder of the fact. It illustrates very particularly, though, just show more how fucking beautiful an idea that is.

I couldn't give it a perfect score, because there's some slow-going throughout. But given the nature of the story and how it's framed, there has to be.

It's real good, in summary, and might make you smile at a stranger or two. show less

Six teenagers meet at an artist summer camp in the woods of Massachusetts. The year is 1974 and a bond forms between this group, that will remain for forty years, following them through relationships, careers, artistic triumphs and letdowns.
Julie (Jules) Jacobson is the main voice here, although we get the perspective of each of the characters. She starts out as a plain gawky fifteen year old, with aspirations of becoming an actress and inadvertently becomes the backbone of “The Interestings”, the name they label themselves. As she watches a few of her friends succeed, she struggles to find her direction.
Like real life, there is plenty of high drama but the author avoids getting melodramatic, keeping the narrative grounded and show more mercifully free of the relentless angst, that sink many novels of this type.
This is a showcase for the craft of writing. Everything precise and on task. At nearly 500 pages, it never feels over-stuffed and lastly, Wolitzer has created one of the best books, I have read, on friendship. An ideal summer read. show less

Whenever I'm intimated by somebody who seems too perfect, I tell myself "They probably have a mouldy patch between their toes", or some other physical flaw in a concealed area. Like this guy who was built like a Greek god, a judo champion with a winning smile, who got everyone to fall in love with him at first sight, and who intimidated the hell out of me - until he turned out to be bipolar. Awful as it sounds, I was relieved. For others it was dandruff, coffee breath, bizarrely shaped genitalia, you name it: almost always there will eventually be a significant flaw to balance the ostensible perfection.
In this book, Ethan, who otherwise has many talents coupled with a strict morality, has eczema, as a visible flaw on his skin. The show more other members of the friends group seem bright and talented (the term "jeunesse dorée" could have been coined especially for them) all have concealed eczema somewhere. They called themselves "The Interestings" when they met as teenagers, full of themselves and of their as yet unfulfilled potential. The book details how these flaws come to the surface, and how these people learn to accept - as we all do - that their accomplishments don't match up to their wild adolescent dreams of invincibility, that we're all flawed in some way, and that we should accept that's the way it is if we want to be happy.
I really enjoyed the first third, where the lead characters are all still teenagers and drunk on their own limitless potential. I couldn't put it down, but I became unsure whether that was because I was reading a critically acclaimed novel or whether I was getting hooked on the equivalent of a daytime soap opera or a high-sugar low-nutrition snack, as relationships in the book evolved, slow as treacle, with sudden unlikely twist turns and wooden, mono-dimensional male characters. Really, author: great style, lovely rhythm, but you need to flesh out your male characters into more realistic people. Your male readership will thank you. show less