by Meg Wolitzer
A lot of the books I love are kind of unusual - they tend to include things like interplanetary soul-sucking weirdos (like The Bone Clocks), or terrifying insects (like The Bees), or even re-imagined fairy tale characters (like the fabulous The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde). The Interestings isn't one of these books. It's about a group of fairly normal (if a little upper-class and pretentious) American friends, their lives and their relationships. And yet, it's nothing if not - well - interesting.
When we meet the main characters of The Interestings, they're self-involved teenagers at an exclusive summer art camp, smoking pot and airily discussing literature. Ethan, Cathy, Ash, Goodman and Jonah are the cool kids at camp - beautiful, privileged and hugely talented. And then there's Jules Jacobson, our protagonist. Blotchy-skinned, poodle-haired and not particularly talented, Jules comes from a decidedly non-posh family in New Jersey, attending the camp on a scholarship and unexpectedly taken under Ash's wing, she becomes a member of this clique, who (with some irony) name themselves "The Interestings" : "From this day forward, because we are clearly the most interesting people who ever fucking lived...because we are just so fucking compelling, our brains swollen with intellectual thoughts, let us be known as the Interestings. And let everyone who meets us fall down dead in our path from just how fucking interesting we are."
The Interestings follows the teenagers' lives from this point on, as they struggle (and occasionally succeed) in their careers and relationships, from high school, through university and young adulthood, through marriages and children and career changes and divorces and illnesses and deaths, to well into middle age.
 |
| Summer Camp in the 1970s - presumably something like this... |
Throughout the book, the narrative switches back and forth between most of the six characters, which works seamlessly to flesh out each of the characters and to better explain the complex relationships between them. The main character though, is Jules and somehow she manages to be the most interesting of them all, despite leading what arguably turns out to be the least interesting life. As a teenager at camp, she worshipped the other five from afar, before unexpectedly becoming one of them. Despite their continuing friendship over the following decades, Jules always feels different and this gives her a unique viewpoint on her friends. The relationship between Jules and her lifelong friend Ash is particularly well-written, with genuine love and affection coupled with a niggling undercurrent of envy and resentment.
 |
| Like, so very happy for your friend and her awesome lunch but also a little bit tempted to punch her in the face and steal it. |
In her first summer with The Interestings, Jules develops a new outlook on life, deciding that nothing is more important than the whole-hearted pursuit of artistic and creative ambition - that the meaning of life is to be successful and to stand out. To be extraordinary. As she devotes herself to a failing acting career while her friends achieve financial and artistic success, Jules becomes a seething mass of jealousy/happiness; she is genuinely pleased for her friends, but she's also incredibly disappointed that it's not happening for her. But then, as her perfectly-happy-just-being-average husband says, "Specialness - everyone wants it. But Jesus, is it the most essential thing there is? Most people aren't talented. So what are they supposed to do - kill themselves?".
It's a great question and one of the themes at the heart of The Interestings - that is, what about those of us who aren't particularly interesting? Can we still be happy if we're not extraordinary?
As Jules herself says, "You didn't always need to be the dazzler, the firecracker, the one who cracked everyone up, or made everyone want to sleep with you, or be the one who wrote and starred in the play that got the standing ovation. You could cease to be obsessed with the idea of being interesting."
The Interestings is a fabulously well-written novel, that details some very believable relationships between very believable characters across a really quite interesting period of time - America over the past forty years. At 560 pages, forty years and six main characters, The Interestings is a long and complicated book but it's never boring or confusing. It's packed full of thought-provoking themes around ambition and aging and feminism, to name just a few. It's a clever, witty and well-written novel, which I would highly recommend and (it really does have to be said) it's just interesting.
9/10
No comments:
Post a Comment