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. 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. 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. Her friend Jonah, a gifted musician, stops playing the guitar and becomes an engineer. Jules Jacobson, an aspiring comic actress, eventually resigns herself to a more practical occupation and lifestyle. 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. In The Interestings, Wolitzer follows these characters from the height of youth through middle age, as their talents, fortunes, and degrees of satisfaction diverge. Decades later the bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable. It’s everyone’s.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. But the very human moments in her work hit you harder than the big ideas. She’s every bit as literary as Franzen or Eugenides. Book review: The Interestings, By Meg Wolitzer. Luckily for us, that’s how Wolitzer approaches storytelling, too. As these ”gifted children” reach middle age, the book also suggests that artistic merit may be less important a goal than emotional fulfillment. Wolitzer writes with real empathy about the ways friendships change and deepen amid great successes and disappointments, asking how people cope when the friends they love best are the ones they’re most jealous of.
But it’s Ethan, an awkward cartoonist, who’s the breakout star: He goes on to develop a hit TV show, marry Ash, and get rich while the others just get older, adjusting their expectations in the decades to come. Jonah plays the banjo, Cathy dances, and Ash’s brother, Goodman, wants to be an architect. Her story begins at an arts camp in upstate New York in 1974, where six teenagers are drawn together because they all think they’re ”interesting.” Schlubby Jules and her beautiful best friend, Ash, both dream of acting.
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