The Interestings: A Novel by Meg Wolitzer (English) Paperback Book

Description: The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer "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)The New York Times–bestselling novel by Meg Wolitzer 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 successful—true 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. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Author Biography Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Interestings, The Uncoupling, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, The Wife, and Sleepwalking. She is also the author of the young adult novel, Belzhar. Wolitzer lives in New York City. Review "Remarkable . . . [The Interestingss] inclusive vision and generous sweep place it among the ranks of books like Jonathan Franzens Freedom and Jeffrey Eugenides The Marriage Plot. The Interestings is warm, all-American, and acutely perceptive about the feelings and motivations of its characters, male and female, young and old, gay and straight; but its also stealthily, unassumingly, and undeniably a novel of ideas. . . . 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)"The big questions asked by The Interestings are about what happened to the world (when, Jules wonders, did analyst stop denoting Freud and start referring to finance?) and what happened to all that budding teenage talent. Might every privileged schoolchild have a bright future in dance or theater or glass blowing? Ms. Wolitzer hasnt got the answers, but she does have her characters mannerisms and attitudes down cold."—The New York Times"I dont want to insult Meg Wolitzer by calling her sprawling, engrossing new novel, The Interestings, her most ambitious, because throughout her 30-year career of turning out well-observed, often very funny books at a steady pace, I have no doubt she has always been ambitious. . . . But "The Interestings" is exactly the kind of book that literary sorts who talk about ambitious works . . . are talking about. . . . Wolitzer is almost crushingly insightful; she doesnt just mine the contemporary mind, she seems to invade it."—San Francisco Chronicle"A sprawling, marvelously inventive novel . . . ambitious and enormously entertaining."—The Washington Post"A supremely engrossing, deeply knowing, genius-level enterprise . . . The novel is thick and thickly populated. And yet Wolitzer is brilliant at keeping the reader close by her side as she takes her story back and forth across time, in and out of multiple lives, and into the tangle of countless continuing, sometimes compromising, conversations."—Chicago Tribune"Masterful, sweeping . . . Her clear gaze captures the intricacies of lasting friendship, enduring love, marital sacrifice, bitter squabbles, family secrets, parental angst and deep loss. Though the story hops back and forth in time, it is rarely confusing, frequently funny and always engaging. . . . A story that feels real and true and more than fulfills the promise of the title. It is interesting, yes, but also moving, compelling, fascinating, and rewarding."—Miami Herald"Wolitzer has produced a novel that is big by at least a couple of clear measures—its nearly 500 pages long, and it covers a lot of time and drama in the lives of a small circle of friends. . . . Its a small world in which these characters want to live large, and Wolitzer is wonderful at conveying that through the point of view of someone who doesnt even see it, all the while shading in the stuff that lives, big and small, are made of."—Minneapolis Star Tribune"Its a ritual of childhood—that solemn vow never to lose touch, no matter what. And for six artsy teenagers whose lives unfold in Wolitzers big-hearted, ambitious new novel, the vow holds for almost four decades."—People"Readers may also enjoy comparing The Interestings with Claire Messuds The Emperors Children . . . In probing the unpredictable relationship between early promise and success and the more dependable one between self-acceptance and happiness, Wolitzers novel is not just a big book but a shrewd one."—Christian Science Monitor"[The Interestings] soars, primarily because Wolitzer insists on taking our teenage selves seriously and, rather than coldly satirizing them, comes at them with warm humor and adult wisdom."—Elle"In Meg Wolitzers lovely, wise The Interestings, Julie Jacobson begins the summer of 74 as an outsider at arts camp until she is accepted into a clique of teenagers with whom she forms a lifelong bond. Through well-tuned drama and compassionate humor, Wolitzer chronicles the living organism that is friendship, and arcs it over the cours of more than thirty years."—O, the Oprah Magazine"Wonderful."—Vanity Fair"Juicy, perceptive and vividly written."—NPR.org"A sprawling, ambitious and often wistful novel."—USA Today"What becomes a legend most? or rather, who? Those with innate ability? Those blessed with enough beauty or money to indulge any creative whim? Or just those who want it the most? In The Interestings, Meg Wolitzers quarry is ambition: what it means to have it, how to use it, how its lost."—Time"Best-selling novelist Meg Wolitzer specializes in witty, knowing takes on contemporary marriage, divorce, and relationships. Her ninth novel, The Interestings, is smart, nuanced, and fun to read, in part because of the effervescent evocation of New York City from Watergate to today, in part because of the idiosyncratic authenticity of her characters."—The Daily Beast"Youll want to be friends with these characters long after you put down the book."—Marie Claire"A page-turner."—Cosmopolitan"[A] big, juicy novel . . . Wolitzers finger is unerringly on the pulse of our social culture."—Readers Digest"Meg Wolitzer kicks off her buzzy tenth novel in 1974 at a summer camp for artsy kids, where a tight-knit group of campers is plotting world domination. The result is a Franzen-like treatise on talent, fate, friendship, and the limits of all three."—V Magazine"Breathtaking in its scope and a remarkably fun page-turner . . . "[Wolitzers] social commentary on art, money and fame should have her compared to Tom Wolfe, but her work is much larger than that."—Matchbook"[The Interestings is] so approachable one can almost miss the excellence and precision of its prose. . . . Ultimately The Interestings is absorbing and immensely likeable."—Nylon"Like Virginia Woolf in The Waves, Meg Wolitzer gives us the full picture here, charting her characters lives from the self-dramatizing of adolescence, through the resignation of middle age, to the attainment of a wisdom that holds all the intensities of life in a single, sustained chord, much like this book itself. The wit, intelligence, and deep feeling of Wolitzers writing are extraordinary and The Interestings brings her achievement, already so steadfast and remarkable, to an even higher level."—Jeffrey Eugenides"Wolitzer follows a group of friends from adolescence at an artsy summer camp in 1974 through adulthood and into late-middle age as their lives alternately intersect, diverge and reconnect. . . . Ambitious and involving, capturing the zeitgeist of the liberal intelligentsia of the era."—Kirkus (starred) Review Quote "Remarkable . . . [ The Interestings s] inclusive vision and generous sweep place it among the ranks of books like Jonathan Franzens Freedom and Jeffrey Eugenides The Marriage Plot . The Interestings is warm, all-American, and acutely perceptive about the feelings and motivations of its characters, male and female, young and old, gay and straight; but its also stealthily, unassumingly, and undeniably a novel of ideas. . . . 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) "The big questions asked by The Interestings are about what happened to the world (when, Jules wonders, did analyst stop denoting Freud and start referring to finance?) and what happened to all that budding teenage talent. Might every privileged schoolchild have a bright future in dance or theater or glass blowing? Ms. Wolitzer hasnt got the answers, but she does have her characters mannerisms and attitudes down cold."- The New York Times "I dont want to insult Meg Wolitzer by calling her sprawling, engrossing new novel, The Interestings , her most ambitious, because throughout her 30-year career of turning out well-observed, often very funny books at a steady pace, I have no doubt she has always been ambitious. . . . But "The Interestings" is exactly the kind of book that literary sorts who talk about ambitious works . . . are talking about. . . . Wolitzer is almost crushingly insightful; she doesnt just mine the contemporary mind, she seems to invade it."- San Francisco Chronicle "A Discussion Question for Reading Group Guide 1) Think about how talent is presented in the book. In your opinion, is it something you are born with or something you work hard to achieve? What is Meg Wolitzer saying about early talent? How is it important to future success? What roles do money and class play in fostering talent? Think about Jules and Ash. How does money influence the trajectories of their lives? 2) Jealousy is referred to in the book as being "I want what you have," whereas envy is "I want what you have, but I also want to take it away so you cant have it." Who is jealous in this book? Who is envious? Can jealousy become envy? How is envy tied up in issues like talent and money? 3) Single parents, lost parents, and absent parents play a role in this novel. In what ways do the families the characters were born into shape their futures? Ash and Goodman are the only characters to come from an intact nuclear family that is able to provide for all their needs. Do you think this is necessarily a good thing for Goodman? What about Ash? 4) Despite the well-quoted sentiment that "you cant go home again," Jules tries to return to the place that felt like her spiritual, emotional, and artistic home. Are there circumstances in life in which you can go home again successfully? Is Jules foolish to give up her current life for something much more uncertain? What positive changes does the experience bring? 5) Despite how much she wants to, Jules cannot make herself fall in love with Ethan. Do you wish she were able to? Do you think Jules wishes she could? What about Ethan? 6) Ethan is one of the most noble characters in the book, and yet he has trouble reconciling his sons condition and lies to Ash to avoid going to Mos evaluation. How does Ethans ambivalence about Mo change the way you feel about him? How do you feel about Juless complicity in his deception? 7) The shift from the seventies to the eighties to the current moment is an important one depicted in the book. What do you think Meg Wolitzer is trying to say about art and how art is sold? How does the commoditization of art change the role of the artist? Was the art of the seventies as pure as it seemed to the creators? The Wunderlichs remain true to an even earlier version of what art should be. What are the positives of that vision? What are its limits? 8) What role does geography play in the book? Think about the different spaces and homes represented: Manhattan, Underhill, Spirit-in-the-Woods. What do they say about the people who live in them? Think about Juless own feelings about her mothers home in Underhill compared with the Wolfs home in Manhattan. What do those two spaces mean to her? Excerpt from Book ONE On a warm night in early July of that long-evaporated year, the Interestings gathered for the very first time. They were only fifteen, sixteen, and they began to call themselves the name with tentative irony. Julie Jacobson, an outsider and possibly even a freak, had been invited in for obscure reasons, and now she sat in a corner on the unswept floor and attempted to position herself so she would appear unobtrusive yet not pathetic, which was a difficult balance. The teepee, designed ingeniously though built cheaply, was airless on nights like this one, when there was no wind to push in through the screens. Julie Jacobson longed to unfold a leg or do the side-to-side motion with her jaw that sometimes set off a gratifying series of tiny percussive sounds inside her skull. But if she called attention to herself in any way now, someone might start to wonder why she was here; and really, she knew, she had no reason to be here at all. It had been miraculous when Ash Wolf had nodded to her earlier in the night at the row of sinks and asked if she wanted to come join her and some of the others later. Some of the others . Even that wording was thrilling. Julie had looked at her with a dumb, dripping face, which she then quickly dried with a thin towel from home. Jacobson , her mother had written along the puckered edge in red laundry marker in a tentative hand that now seemed a little tragic. "Sure," she had said, out of instinct. What if shed said no ? she liked to wonder afterward in a kind of strangely pleasurable, baroque horror. What if shed turned down the lightly flung invitation and went about her life, thudding obliviously along like a drunk person, a blind person, a moron, someone who thinks that the small packet of happiness she carries is enough. Yet having said "sure" at the sinks in the girls bathroom, here she was now, planted in the corner of this unfamiliar, ironic world. Irony was new to her and tasted oddly good, like a previously unavailable summer fruit. Soon, she and the rest of them would be ironic much of the time, unable to answer an innocent question without giving their words a snide little adjustment. Fairly soon after that, the snideness would soften, the irony would be mixed in with seriousness, and the years would shorten and fly. Then it wouldnt be long before they all found themselves shocked and sad to be fully grown into their thicker, finalized adult selves, with almost no chance for reinvention. That night, though, long before the shock and the sadness and the permanence, as they sat in Boys Teepee 3, their clothes bakery sweet from the very last washer- dryer loads at home, Ash Wolf said, "Every summer we sit here like this. We should call ourselves something." "Why?" said Goodman, her older brother. "So the world can know just how unbelievably interesting we are?" "We could be called the Unbelievably Interesting Ones," said Ethan Fig-man. "Hows that?" "The Interestings," said Ash. "That works." So it was decided. "From this day forward, because we are clearly the most interesting people who ever fucking lived ," said Ethan, "because we are just so fucking compelling , our brains swollen with intellectual thoughts, let us be known as the Interestings. And let everyone who meets us fall down dead in our path from just how fucking interesting we are." In a ludicrously ceremonial moment they lifted paper cups and joints. Julie risked raising her cup of vodka and Tang--"V&T," theyd called it--nodding gravely as she did this. "Clink," Cathy Kiplinger said. "Clink," said all the others. The name was ironic, and the improvisational christening was jokily pretentious, but still, Julie Jacobson thought, they were interesting. These teenagers around her, all of them from New York City, were like royalty and French movie stars, with a touch of something papal. Everyone at this camp was supposedly artistic, but here, as far as she could tell, was the hot little nucleus of the place. She had never met anyone like these peop≤ they were interesting compared not only with the residents of Underhill, the New York suburb where shed lived since birth, but also compared with what was generally out there , which at the moment seemed baggy suited, nefarious, thoroughly repulsive. Briefly, in that summer of 1974, when she or any of them looked up from the deep, stuporous concentration of their one-act plays and animation cels and dance sequences and acoustic guitars, they found themselves staring into a horrible doorway, and so they quickly turned away. Two boys at camp had copies of All the Presidents Men on the shelves above their beds, beside big aerosol cans of Off! and small bottles of benzoyl peroxide meant to dash flourishing, excitable acne. The book had come out not long before camp began, and at night when the teepee talk wound down into sleep or rhythmic, crickety masturbation, they would read by flashlight. Can you believe those fuckers ? they thought. This was the world they were meant to enter: a world of fuckers. Julie Jacobson and the others paused before the doorway to that world, and what were they supposed to do--just walk through it? Later in the summer Nixon would lurch away, leaving his damp slug trail, and the entire camp would watch on an old Panasonic that had been trundled into the dining hall by the owners, Manny and Edie Wunderlich, two aging Socialists who were legendary in the small, diminishing world of aging Socialists. Now they were gathering because the world was unbearable, and they themselves were not. Julie allowed herself another slight degree of movement, crossing and recrossing her arms. But still no one turned and insisted on knowing who had invited this awkward, redheaded, blotchy girl in. Still no one asked her to leave. She looked around the dim room, where everyone was mostly inert on the bunks and on the wooden slats of the floor, like people in a sauna. Ethan Figman, thick bodied, unusually ugly, his features appearing a little bit flattened, as if pressed against a mimes invisible glass wall, sat with his mouth slack and a record album in his lap. He was one of the first people shed noticed after her mother and sister drove her up here days earlier. He had been wearing a floppy denim hat then, and he greeted everyone around him on the lawn, grabbing the ends of trunks, allowing himself to be smashed into platonic hugs with girls and soul handshakes with other boys. People cried out to him, "Ethan! Ethan!" and he was pulled toward each voice in turn. "That boy looks ridiculous," Julies sister, Ellen, said quietly as they stood on the lawn, fresh out of their green Dodge Dart and the four-hour drive from Underhill. He did look ridiculous, but Julie already felt the need to be protective of this boy she didnt know. "No he doesnt," she said. "He looks fine." They were sisters, only sixteen months apart, but Ellen, the older one, was dark-haired, closed-faced, and held surprisingly condemnatory opinions, which had often been dispersed in the small ranch house where they lived with their mother, Lois, and, until that winter, their father, Warren, who had died of pancreatic cancer. Julie would always remember what sharing close quarters with a dying person had been like; particularly what it had been like sharing the single, peach-colored bathroom that her poor father had apologetically monopolized. She had begun to get her period when she was fourteen and a half--much later than anyone else she knew--and she found herself in need of the bathroom at times when it wasnt available. Huddling in her bedroom with an enormous box of Kotex, she thought of the contrast between herself, "emerging into womanhood," according to the movie that the gym teacher had shown the girls much earlier, in sixth grade, and her father, emerging into something else that she didnt want to think about but which was upon her at all times. In January he was dead, which was a grinding torment and also a relief, impossible to focus on or stop thinking about. Summer approached, still unfilled. Ellen didnt want to go anywhere, but Julie couldnt just sit at home all summer feeling like this and watching her mother and sister feel like this; it would lead to madness, she decided. At the last minute, her English teacher suggested this camp, which had an open spot and agreed to take Julie on scholarship. Nobody in Underhill went to camps like this o≠ not only wouldnt they have been able to afford it, it wouldnt have occurred to them to go. They all stayed home and went to the local bare-bones day camp, or spent long days oiled up at the town pool or got jobs at Carvel or loafed around their humid houses. No one really had money, and no one ever seemed to think much about not having money. Warren Jacobson had worked in human resources at Clelland Aerospace; Julie had never understood exactly what his job entailed, but she knew that the pay wasnt enough to allow the family to build and maintain a pool in their small backyard. Yet when she was suddenly offered a chance to go away to this camp in the summer, her mother insisted she accept. "Someone should have a little fun in this family," said Lois Jacobson, a new, shaky widow at age forty-one. "Its been a while." Tonight, in Boys Teepee 3, Ethan Figman seemed as confident as hed been on the lawn that first day. Confident, but also probably conscious of his own ugliness, which would never go away over the whole of his life. On the surface of the record album, Ethan began rolling joints with efficiency. It was his job, hed said, and he clearly liked having something to do with his fingers when there was no pen or pencil held between them. He was an animator, and he spent hours Details ISBN1594632340 Author Meg Wolitzer Short Title INTERESTINGS Language English ISBN-10 1594632340 ISBN-13 9781594632341 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY FIC Residence US Year 2014 Subtitle A Novel Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2014-03-25 NZ Release Date 2014-03-25 US Release Date 2014-03-25 Publication Date 2014-03-25 UK Release Date 2014-03-25 Pages 560 Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc Imprint Riverhead Books,U.S. Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. 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