The Interestings

     A couple nights ago I finished The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer.  For some reason I couldn't write about it immediately. I digested and reflected and then finally sat down to write.
     It is the story of a core group of four teenagers, Jules, Ash, Ethan, and Jonah, who meet at an arts summer camp in the 1970s.  The novel follows their lives through randomly shifting chapters of 3rd person focus until one of their group dies from cancer in 2007.  It is a fascinating ride and I have struggled to think about why I was so absorbed. There is some central drama -- and intrigue that makes you wonder -- but that is not what propelled me through the book, not what had me gobbling page after page.  The characters weren't always likeable, and I think that is what resonated for me, the truth of it.
     Wolitzer painted honest portraits of human foibles and folly, jealousy and self-doubt, longing and regret that ebb and flow as we age.  I think the most fascinating was thinking about how many people's identity becomes solidified in the late teens and early 20s -- the way we see and conceive of ourselves (I think I was somewhere between 17-21, and sometimes, my dears, I look in the mirror and feel shocked by what is reflected back because it doesn't jive with the way I "see" myself) -- yet we have all this life -- years and years -- to live after that. Wolitzer explores how this identity can help and hinder us as we age.
     I also think that Woltizer is a master writer.  The way she moves time forward -- she covers over thirty years in these four lives (and the lives of some others).  New sections beginning, "Over that next year, the changes among them were all subtle instead of striking" (125) or "It did not seem so strange, three weeks later, for Jonah Bay to find himself selling dyed pink and blue flowers out of a plastic bucket on a street corner in nearby Brattleboro, Vermont" (285). These leaps in time move the narrative forward through the vast timeline of this story.
     She also uses some of the best foreshadowing I have ever encountered that kept me turning pages.  I don't mean the masterful subtle kind that you might not notice until you are rereading one of those canonical texts, but the kind that places a provocative detail about the future that gets you wondering how the story will get from where it is at that moment to this place in the future.  For instance, on page 125 she writes, "She wished she could make Goodman do that this year, which would be the last full year that all of them would be together. Even not knowing that yet, she felt an intuitive urgency."  I couldn't help but think, "well, what is going to happen that they won't all be together?!" It was like a delicious piece of candy promised in the future, so I kept inhaling her words.
     Time also folds back on itself as the story shifts narrative perspective (although always remaining in the third person) to follow the lives of one of the central characters. The story flows in and out of time, reminds us of details from the past and connects it with the future.  Although as I am writing this something is dawning on me that I had not realized before (and I could be wrong) but the story mostly tells the lives of Jules, Jonah, and Ethan -- Goodman and Ash Wolf (brother and sister) are central to the story, but the perspective is from those who orbit around them.  Huh.  That distance lens seems to be there, which makes sense when I think about it -- the rest of them feel somehow honored to be included in beams that shoot from the Wolf's posh apartment on Central Park West in Manhattan (referred to as "The Labyrinth").
     I think some of my students might like this novel, but I bet it would be best saved for the future. I do think, however, that many of them will like the book I finished earlier this summer (which I will write my next post on), The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz.  Stay tuned!