The Interestings
Meg Wolitzer follows a group of teenagers from art camp on to adult life, with all its successes and disappointments.
The Interestings By Meg Wolitzer Penguin 480 pp.
Reviewed by Heller McAlpin for Barnes & Noble Review
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"The past is so tenacious," the most talented of the ironically self-proclaimed "Interestings," who bond as teenagers at an arts camp in Meg Wolitzer's wise and expansive ninth novel, comments decades later. "Everyone has basically one aria to sing over their entire life," he adds.
Since the publication of her powerful fifth novel, "The Wife," in 2003 – about a woman who channels her own superior talent into her husband's literary career – Wolitzer has been hitting one high note after another in her ongoing exploration of what constitutes a successful life, particularly for women. Filled with characters whose problems are so familiar you feel you might know them, Wolitzer's novels provide perfect fodder for reading groups, raising questions about the balance of career and personal life, ambition, money, sex, and parenting.
Her impressive run of books in the last decade includes "The Position," about the repercussions of a bestselling "Joy of Sex"–type manual on the authors' grown children; "The Ten-Year Nap," about stay-at-home moms wondering how they landed where they are despite their mothers' feminist struggles; and, most recently, "The Uncoupling," about what happens in a small town when all the women involved in a school production of Aristophanes' Lysistrata eschew sex.
Wolitzer has been working at a fever pitch clearly on a mission to write her way out of what she regards as the women's lit ghetto. In her much-discussed New York Times Book Review essay last year, "The Second Shelf," Wolitzer complained that female novelists don't get the same attention and respect as their male counterparts – even when male authors write domestic fiction, such as Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" and Jeffrey Eugenides' "The Marriage Plot." She notes that the differences begin with book size (women's self-edited, slim volumes versus men's doorstoppers) and extend to jacket design (illustrations of laundry hanging on a line versus abstract graphics with author and title trumpeted in bold block letters).
Well, The Interestings announces itself as a big book from the get-go, with its bold, eye-catchingly striped cover and substantial heft. But its increased weightiness isn't just about packaging: It is also a matter of expanded scope and ambition. Wolitzer follows her six main characters from their teens in 1974 through their fifties in 2012, as they try to grasp the puzzling relationship between promise, talent, money, success, sadness, power, love, and luck. Her novel is filled with sharp and often witty observations – not only observing how life "took people and shook them around" but also marking societal changes over a span that encompasses Nixon's resignation, the AIDS crisis, 9/11, and an increased focus on finance. "Since when did 'portfolio' start to refer to money, not artwork? It's like the way if someone's an analyst, it no longer means they're a Freudian, it means they study the stock market," her protagonist observes.
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