The Interestings: A Novel Author: Meg Wolitzer | Language: English | ISBN:
B008U4HH54 | Format: EPUB
The Interestings: A Novel Description
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 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 New York Times–bestselling author Meg Wolitzer comes a new novel that has been called "genius" (The Chicago Tribune), “wonderful” (Vanity Fair), "ambitious" (San Francisco Chronicle), and a “page-turner” (Cosmopolitan), which The New York Times Book Review says is "among the ranks of books like Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and Jeffrey Eugenides The Marriage Plot." 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.
- File Size: 946 KB
- Print Length: 481 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1594488398
- Publisher: Riverhead (April 9, 2013)
- Sold by: Penguin Group (USA) LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B008U4HH54
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #500 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #8
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction > Women's Fiction - #14
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Contemporary Fiction > Literary - #15
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Family Life
- #8
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction > Women's Fiction - #14
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Contemporary Fiction > Literary - #15
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Family Life
I was persuaded by a group of real friends, who are also avid readers, that I should give the latest Meg Wolitzer novel, "The Interestings", a go even though I'd been disappointed by her last novel. I'm glad I listened to them! "The Interestings" is indeed interesting - AND well written, thoughtful and both witty and touching.
I can make the case that "The Interestings" can be considered a historical novel of the past 4 decades; I call that "recent" history because I can remember it! Reading about the 1980s for example, brought back memories of:
- the first cases of AIDS and how bewildering that was
- the first cordless phones
- mugger-full and dirty NYC
- the first soapy taste of the now ubiquitous herb cilantro
- the Moonies
- "Women's Lib" being the term to describe feminism
This novel is full of such memories because it's about six friends who meet in a summer camp for artistic kids in the 70s and it follows their lives into the present, touching on each decade as they make their way to adulthood. The novel moves quickly and is never boring or slow as many things happen to each of these people as they face their lives. It felt voyeuristic - in a good way - to follow their ups and downs. I could relate because I also "grew up" at the same time. There is a bit of jumping around in time and significant foreshadowing which I found to be an effective story-telling device here.
There are many "themes" in the novel; friendship, the nature of art, the meaning of "talent", loss of innocence, sexual attraction, and the relationship between art and money, to name a few. But I think the theme that interested ME the most, was the theme of envy and it's ugly and corrosive nature.
Let me get this out of the way right now: this is a tremendous book. I have a couple of criticisms, which I will get to, but hot damn. Meg Wolitzer has written an astonishingly clever, detailed novel, and the utmost respect must be given to that. Remember this book, because it will definitely be popping up again when people begin compiling best-of lists for 2013.
But let's talk about the novel, shall we? In 1974, six teenagers meet at a summer camp for the arts and jokingly refer to themselves as The Interestings--exactly the kind of ironic, half-kidding-half-hopeful joke that captivates them at that moment in time. The six run the gamut of the art world: a dancer, a musician, an animator; an actress who wants to further the cause of feminism in theater, a wannabe architect, and a comedic actress. The latter character, Jules, forms the center of our story. Significantly, she's also the outlier. Jules isn't an artist when she ends up at Camp Spirit-in-the-Woods. It's unclear how she found her way to a camp for artists when there were so many different options out there (one of those woefully nitpicky details that nevertheless irked me); she simply wanted an escape from her family and the grief they all feel after the abrupt death of her father from cancer. What's important is that she's an outsider in this world when we first meet her, and she very much discovers herself once she has been thrust into The Interestings. She doesn't feel like she belongs but she desperately wants to. She discovers an ability to make people laugh and parlays it into a comical role in a camp play--a moment that overwhelms her with the sense that she has arrived, that she has found her life's calling.
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