The Interestings, by Meg Wolitzer – review

Thick, sentimental and with a narrative bestriding four decades, Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings feels above all like a Victorian novel, one which finds itself as comfortable in our time as it would have been 150 years ago. It’s an American story ruled by classic English themes. Fate, coincidence, class and envy are what bind — and in some cases disperse — the six central characters.

It begins in the mid-1970s, in Spirit-in-the-Woods, a summer camp for young people interested in the performing and visual arts. Run by a couple of bohemians, the camp is supposed to be an approximation of utopia, or, as one character
remarks, the opposite of Lord of the Flies. Here the six teenagers meet and eventually label themselves ‘The Interestings’ as a sarcastic tribute to their only half-joking hubris.

Julie — or Jules as she is rechristened by her new friends — is particularly enamoured of the camp. A ‘dandeliony, poodly outsider’, she sees greatness all around her. There’s Ethan, a bright cartoonist filled with unreciprocated love for Jules, and Jonah, an introverted musician who is somehow unwilling to pursue his craft. Highest in Jules’s affections is Ash, a pretty girl with a rich family in New York. Ash and her brother, Goodman, represent a hip city life which seems to beckon Jules, while also causing her to glance regretfully at her own small-town mother and sister.

To the surprise of everyone Ash later marries Ethan, and Ethan takes on the potential of all six friends for himself — his own television cartoon makes him a millionaire. But he’s the exception. Much of the novel is about failed ambition and the burning desire to be special, and how this desire can flicker to nothing under a range of forces, not least economics, disposition and ‘the most daunting and most determining force of all, luck’.