Named a best book of the year by Entertainment Weekly, Time, and The Chicago Tribune, and named a notable book by The New York Times Book Review and The Washington Post “Remarkable . . . With this book [Wolitzer] has surpassed herself.”—The New York Times Book Review “A victory . . . The Interestings secures Wolitzer’s place among the best novelists of her generation. . . . She’s every bit as … among the best novelists of her generation. . . . She’s every bit as literary as Franzen or Eugenides. But the very human moments in her work hit you harder than the big ideas. This isn’t women’s fiction. It’s everyone’s.”—Entertainment Weekly (A)
From Meg Wolitzer, the New York Times–bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, a novel that has been called “genius” (The Chicago Tribune), “wonderful” (Vanity Fair), “ambitious” (San Francisco Chronicle), and a “page-turner” (Cosmopolitan).
The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable. Decades later the bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. In The Interestings, Wolitzer follows these characters from the height of youth through middle age, as their talents, fortunes, and degrees of satisfaction diverge.
The kind of creativity that is rewarded at age fifteen is not always enough to propel someone through life at age thirty; not everyone can sustain, in adulthood, what seemed so special in adolescence. Jules Jacobson, an aspiring comic actress, eventually resigns herself to a more practical occupation and lifestyle. Her friend Jonah, a gifted musician, stops playing the guitar and becomes an engineer. But Ethan and Ash, Jules’s now-married best friends, become shockingly successful—true to their initial artistic dreams, with the wealth and access that allow those dreams to keep expanding. The friendships endure and even prosper, but also underscore the differences in their fates, in what their talents have become and the shapes their lives have taken.
Wide in scope, ambitious, and populated by complex characters who come together and apart in a changing New York City, The Interestings explores the meaning of talent; the nature of envy; the roles of class, art, money, and power; and how all of it can shift and tilt precipitously over the course of a friendship and a life.
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If you asked me what this book was about — I wouldn’t be able to tell you.
But that’s part of the beauty of this book — it’s about everything (friendship, envy, adolescence, dreams, love, betrayal) and nothing simultaneously.
It revolves around a group of six friends that meet at an art camp when they are 15. That camp defines them and their friendship as they grow older. Though each character follows a path of their own in NYC, each one of them is filled with rawness, realness, and complexity.
Thanks for the rec @goldenjo !
The Interestings is a truly absorbing book about love, friendship, creativity, and even envy. Starting out with a tight-knit, artsy, ambitious group of teenage friends — this book follows their friendships and relationships throughout their lives.
Having grown up with a creative and ambitious community of friends myself, The Interestings sometimes hit a bit uncomfortably close to home. But the fearlessness in which this book discusses emotions such as jealousy and envy was actually quite humbling and I ended up truly appreciating this aspect of the book.
I felt like I really knew these people. I went to camp with the, grew up with them and loved reading about them. It sucks you right in
Nobody beats Meg Wolitzer at capturing the time of life when everyone is somewhere in between adolescence and becoming adult, and she does it here superbly among a group of talented New Yorkers who go off to a summer camp where their lives become forever entwined. This is a great book to take on a trip or a vacation.
I’m a sucker for books about nostalgia and youth and dreams realized and deferred, and this novel checks all those boxes. It’s the best story I can recall about talent and how it grows, changes or fades over the course of a lifetime. I felt the story slowed down a bit with about 100 pages to go, but new and surprising chapters continued to develop in all the characters’ lives and I was ultimately satisfied with the ending.
Lengthy and character driven instead of plot driven, but a good read. Could have pared down the number of pages, especially considering not much consideration put into the development of each decade and seemed to just fast forward through the years.
I loved the idea of these characters who meet at summer camp and how their lives intertwine over th years.
I just loved everything about The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer— the characters, the plot, the witty dialogue. I tried to read it slowly, because every sentence was a gem. The Interestings moved me so deeply, and it’s a book I’ll be thinking about for years to come.
Perhaps because I am slightly older than the characters in this book (meaning generationally), I found them annoying. Yes, they were witty but so “into” themselves that I wanted to smack them. “Get over yourself!” I didn’t find any of the characters particularly endearing and the fact that they deemed THEMSELVES the “interestings,” well, how pompous and smug. I was disappointed because I know many folks who enjoyed this book but it didn’t do anything for me.
Just kinda boring
Boring
It’s hard to describe what this book is really about — it follows a group of teens who meet at summer camp and explores the intertwined lives they live afterward — but it’s full of lovely writing and emotional insight, and I really enjoyed the read.
Liked it.
I believe a book is exceptional if the characters (or some random plot points) come to mind weeks, months, or maybe even years after I’ve read it. Jules, Ash, Ethan, Dennis, Goodman and Cathy pop into my consciousness every now and then, and that’s a testament to Meg Wolitzer.
I’m drawn to coming of age storylines. This book has you reliving that feeling of being on the outside looking in, the euphoria of newfound freedom, the pain and thrill of young love, and the moral dilemmas we all face in one form or another.
We get to go along for the ride with the characters through marriages, divorces, life and death. Empty success, self-discovery, coming to terms with one’s own mediocrity, and recognizing simple pleasures as the best this life has to offer–everything we experience as we move through this life. I devoured this book.
Highly recommended.
Great story.
Any book called The Interestings sets the stage, and itself up, for something that should be, well… interesting. A high bar, no doubt, but while the story WAS interesting for the most part, it couldn’t quite sustain that level of appeal all the way to the conclusion.
It’s a not-unfamiliar coming-of-age tale that follows a group of disparate kids who connect during the lazy summer days of camp and somewhat unexpectedly stay connected through the ensuing decades of their lives. Wolitzer is undeniably a skilled writer, painting the stage of that nostalgic summer with tangible, tactile details and characters with distinct, compelling personalities, allowing us to not only – at least generally – like them, but trail along as they move past childhood into their eccentric and not always happy adult lives.
The book held my interest even when events got a little less sympathetic, particularly when a main character behaves with a dramatic lack of ethics. But even as it held my interest, it strained credulity when most of the characters – and thereby the readers – were asked to continue to care about this character long after we stop.
But it was in the aging of the characters that the book seemed most wobbly. While Wolitzer very authentically captured their youth and young adulthood, her depiction of life after 50 rang of cliches and a weary – and, to my mind, unrealistic – expectation that we culturally agree that by 50 life is pretty much over; we’ve lost our verve and there’s not much to look forward to. I kept thinking to myself: at 50??
I originally wondered if the author was too young to truly KNOW what life after 50 is about (further research proved she isn’t!), but as a reader who also knows the decade, and knows many in it who are as vibrant, ambitious and energized as some in their 30s and 40s, I felt she painted a picture of 50 that was enervating and not completely believable. By the book’s end, frankly, I didn’t really care too much what happened to these exhausted people: they’d stopped being… interesting.
But not a bad read, often a very engaging one; it just seemed to lose steam along with the characters, leading to a weary conclusion that was ultimately forgettable.
Weird
I didn’t think it would ever end.
An all-time favorite book, with an astute eye on friendship, relationships, family dynamics. Have reread it several times.
I stumbled onto this book because of the author’s profile in a local independent newspaper. I wanted to see what a pioneering outspoken woman in publishing had to say in a novel. The title intrigued me. I was actually more interested in the next book, but felt I should start with her first one and then read the second just in case they built on each other. They did not. I found the characters interesting but not truly relatable. I like the second book, The Female Persuasion better, but think reading this one first helped me get accustomed to the author’s voice, which might have made reading the second book first less enjoyable.