Amazon readers gave The Interestings 3.6 stars
Goodreads readers gave The Interestings 3.6 stars
One of the reviews I read called The Interestings “remarkable” and compared it to The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. No wonder many of the Friday Morning bookclub members did not enjoy it…..we only gave The Marriage Plot 1.75 Omelets.
Clearly not a Friday Morning Bookclub favorite!
Wolitzer has written a sprawling, decades-long tale of East Coast kids who meet at an arts camp and jokingly refer to themselves as The Interestings–exactly the kind of ironic, half-kidding-half-hopeful joke that captivates them at that moment in 1974. The six teenagers run the gamut of the art world: a dancer, a musician, an animator, an actress and feminist, an architect, and a comedic actress. The latter character, Jules, forms the center of the story: Jules is not an artist when she ends up at Camp Spirit-in-the-Woods. She is an outlier: a scholarship kid enamored of the privilege and talent of the others.
As the clique of six teenagers sit around in Boys’ Teepee 3, they establish a group dynamic that will endure not only for the rest of that summer (and the summers to come), but for much of the next thirty-odd years. Unfortunately, I think Wolitzer got it right when at the end of the book she has Jules describe these decades as: “…an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop…”
The overall messages of the book seems to be that life sucks, gets better again, sucks a little more, gets better, and so on and so forth. No, the book was not that interesting.
The Interestings follows Julie Jacobson, Ash Wolf, Goodman Wolf, Ethan Figman, Cathy Kipling and Jonah Bay from those carefree teen years through adult hood.
It is about Friendship, Fate and Loyalty.
Here is what some of our bloggers have to say:
Coming of age
not so INTERESTING
long, slow, boring
would not recommend
Good character development
How would you describe The Interestings…..In Three Words?
