I read several reviews that describe this novel as “astute,” and that’s a perfect word to use Wolitzer, through her prose, nails so many universal human experiences and emotions: jealousy, dissatisfaction, early love, sadness, euphoria, nostalgia. I bookmarked so many passages on my Kindle that I can hardly choose which ones to share, because Wolitzer’s observations about life are all so on-the-nose. This book has a lot of great stuff in it. A group of smart, privileged teenagers who enjoy, variously, music, pretentious literature, animation, drama, and weed, come together as friends and deem themselves “The Interestings.” (This opening, while obnoxious, nonetheless rings true, because don’t all teenagers labor under the delusion that they and their friends are The Most Interesting People in the World?) The novel then traces the lives of these five friends - Jules, Ethan, Ash, Goodman, and Jonah - over the next forty-odd years, as some excel and others flounder.

And then, along the way, things started to change.įirst, a very brief plot summary of the book: the story starts off at a summer camp for the arts in the Berkshires in 1974. And, indeed, as soon as I started reading this book, I loved it. Barrie Hardymon, a guest contributor on one of my favoritest podcasts, NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, raved about the book, and I tend to like her suggestions, so all systems were go. This novel had been compared to Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot and, well, they had me at Eugenides. At first, I had read and heard only positive reviews.

However, all of the aforementioned buzz was both a blessing and a curse in terms of my enjoyment of this book. Instead, I snapped it right up onto my Kindle shortly after it came out.

However, unlike AVFTGS, I didn’t put off reading this one until everyone and their mother had read it. This was one of those books, like Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, about which I had heard a tremendous amount of buzz before I read it. And now I need to figure out whether I liked or disliked this book, because it could go either way. I finished Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings last night and was so bummed out by both the ending and my own reaction to the book that I immediately had to start something more upbeat (in this case, Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park, which is excellent so far) in order to take my mind off of The Interestings before going to sleep.

The interestings