In chapter four we go back to 1981 and are still with Jules at chapter five we’re back in 1974, again with Jules. Chapter three, while still taking place in ‘09, jumps back to the now adult Jules. The next chapter, however, takes place in 2009, and is, inexplicably, about the people who ran the camp. The first chapter is from Jules’s perspective and takes place in 1974 at the summer camp. The book makes odd leaps in both time and perspective. Unfortunately, many of those observations are revealed in unsatisfying ways. This is the most engaging plotline of the book and the real spine of the story.Īlong the way, The Interestings makes many astute observations about how difficult it can be to maintain friendships in the face of family drama, distance, and class. When Ethan creates a cartoon that makes him a billionaire, Jules struggles with the jealousy as she trudges along in a much more economically and career compromised life. The two remain friends, even after Ethan becomes involved with, and eventually marries, Jules’ closest friend Ash. The book follows these six people from childhood to middle age, as they come to terms with their various successes and failures.Īs children, Jules and Ethan have a brief romantic relationship, one that ends at her insistence. There is the beautiful, open-hearted Ash her moody, enigmatic brother Goodman sensitive musician Jonah emotional dancer Cathy and the brilliant animator Ethan. Jules, a plain middle class girl from Long Island who just lost her father to cancer, is attending the camp on scholarship and is immediately smitten with her new artistic friends and their upper-class Manhattan lives. The Interestings has an ensemble cast, but its lead is Jules Jacobson, who in the summer of 1974 finds herself inducted into the cool kid inner circle at Spirit in the Woods, a New England summer camp for privileged children. When considered as a whole, the pieces don’t fit together in an organic, satisfying way. But its ambitions also exceed Wolitzer’s strengths the book suffers from odd pacing, random shifts in perspective, and haphazard leaps in time.

It is compelling when it offers a sustained, ground-level view through one of her character’s eyes, which comprises the bulk of the book. At four hundred eighty pages, and covering forty years of half a dozen lives, its ambition is both broad and admirable. Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings is a beast of a book.

The interestings