Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings tells the story of six friends who meet at a summer camp for the arts in Massachusetts in the late 1970s. The six youths remain great friends into their 40s and beyond (well, four of them do) and experience life, love, death, heartbreak together in New York City. Jules (nee Julie), Ethan, Jonah, Cathy, Goodman and Ash gather for the first time in a teepee at Spirit in the Woods in 1974 and dub themselves “The Interestings” at first ironically, but one wonders how self-aware these teens really are. Each member has some sort of talent; some even have great talent and will be successful for the rest of their lives due to skills honed at the camp. Most of them, however, must reconcile themselves to normalcy as adults, and this is the bulk of the book’s theme – how do you deal with not being special?
If you’re Jules Jacobson – not well. She’s the main focus of this book, at least that’s the impression I got. Most of the chapters reflect her inner thoughts, which for the most part focus on Jules and her inability to get over her jealousy at Ethan and Ash’s immense success. Ethan creates a long-running cartoon for adults (a la The Simpsons) and Ash is a successful playwright and director. They can afford to travel in luxury and often want to share their wealth with their good friends. Jules and her husband Dennis barely make ends meet in their walk up in downtown, and Jonah has hidden from his natural musical talent and managed a career in engineering, creating prosthetics (I think) for disabled folks. Whatever he does it’s not mentioned more than once because Jonah is a minor character, which is one of the weaknesses of this book. Wolitzer focuses so much on Jules and her inability to handle being normal that she ignores what probably would have been far more interesting characters and stories.
Jonah, for example, is the child of a famous folk singer, with a natural proclivity toward music as well. This is ripped from him when one of his mother’s boyfriends on tour with them continuously doses Jonah with acid to elicit ideas for music and then steal them for his own. Cathy is a wannabe dancer with some definite talent and an unfortunately curvaceous body. She is a non-issue though – she and Goodman go off together New Year’s Eve one night and later she claims to have been raped by him. Goodman is Ash’s beloved older brother with no visible talents (aside from good looks) or ambition. All the Interestings turn on Cathy except Ethan (who only keeps up with her in secret) and we basically never hear from her again. Goodman flees before his case goes to trial and I won’t spoil what happens with him as it’s pretty integral to what little plot there is.
There are reasons to read this book – Wolitzer is a good writer, even if her subjects are kind of self-centered and nothing really happens in this book. The main theme is worth exploring – what happens when the talents you were so proud of in high school or as late as college don’t pan out in the real world? Most of us live normal lives without large dreams of stardom and manage it fairly well, but what about those of us who exhibit SOME talent, just not enough? Everyone knows someone that’s doing better at life than themselves. How do you accept that and move on and continue friendships in this situation? I personally have been on both sides of this coin and honestly there is some envy sometimes, but for the most part I have been able to accept things as they are. If I had less (or more) at the time it’s because of choices I made, not my friends, so it’s interesting to read about people who really didn’t have that choice and still had to deal with the consequences. When your goal is stardom or success in the arts, you aren’t really left with a lot of choice in the matter it seems.
These characters are from a generation before mine, so it brings back the movies of my childhood, ones relating to summer camp, adolescence and coming of age. These would have been contemporaries of the characters and it’s just a nice refresher of times gone by that I experienced in movie theaters as a kid. The book is a little long but it actually reads pretty easily. I wouldn’t say this is a great beach read but it’s definitely appropriate for summer, though very little of the book takes place in summer itself. Check this out if you’re interested in a character study about artsy (with limited success) New Yorkers.
