The Interestings: A Novel

About this book

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 Wolitzers place among the best novelists of her generation. . . . Shes every bit as literary as Franzen or Eugenides. But the very human moments in her work hit you harder than the big ideas. This isnt womens fiction. Its everyones."Entertainment Weekly (A) From New York Timesbestselling 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 Franzens 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 Juless now-married best friends become shockingly successfultrue 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.