MEG WOLITZER The Interestings. Reviewed by Sonia Nair
American novelist Meg Wolitzer holds a mirror to the caprices of desire, friendship and envy in 20th century New York, a time of resurgent feminism, the AIDS outbreak, unexamined privilege and unbridled corruption.
An all-encompassing palimpsest that looks at American society’s fixation with being extraordinary, The Interestings straddles several decades, three generations and multiple characters. But it is Jules Jacobson who frames the story; her musings are our entry into the world of the ‘Interestings’, her parting thoughts the epilogue on what it means to be special.
Accidentally finding herself on the fringe of the coolest group in an arts summer camp, Jules – formerly known as Julie, a gawky ‘poodle-headed girl’ grappling with the loss of her father – is rechristened and granted a second lease of life as she is taken under the wing of those who will eventually become her lifelong friends. Finding herself simultaneously a best friend, an actor and a comedian for the first time in her life, Jules’s experience at the camp is transformative.
Surrounding Jules are the prodigiously talented animator Ethan Figman, the delicate and adored Ash Wolf, her exceedingly handsome misfit brother Goodman Wolf, the quietly thoughtful musician Jonah Bay, and the emotionally demanding dancer Cathy Kiplinger. Only half-ironically crowning themselves the ‘Interestings’, the friends embark on a lifelong love affair with developing their inherent talents and becoming exceptional.
By giving Jules the narrative voice, Wolitzer prizes the ordinary above the remarkable – forcing readers to examine society’s overarching obsession with boundless talent and the subsequent power that confers. Jules has neither. Dabbling in comic acting with moderate degrees of success at the arts summer camp, she has neither the chops to make it in the cutthroat acting world nor the privilege of being born into a prosperous family, like Ash, and having her fledgling projects constantly bankrolled. But in a departure from circumscribed depictions of budding romances, Ethan’s confession about why he loves Jules is refreshing and above all, real.
‘You’re just so much yourself,’ he said with a shrug. ‘You’re not all neurotic like some girls – watching what they eat all the time, or pretending to be a little less smart than a boy. You’re ambitious, you’re quick, you’re really funny, and you’re a good friend. And, of course, you’re adorable.’
Wolitzer’s pairing up of Ethan with Ash taps into the sharp contrast between the accumulation of new money and inherited wealth. Ethan is painted as the more vulgar of the two, however – despite rising to the top by virtue of his own skills – as he adroitly learns to play the role of a rich man, channels an increasing fascination with multiplying the money he has, and grows increasingly distant from his family. Jules’s husband Dennis is the perfect foil to these preoccupations – choosing to be an ultrasound technician ‘not because he’d grown up with a desire to know what lay beneath surfaces’ but because he’d seen a ‘convincing ad on the subway for ultrasound school’: ‘There was no life Dennis burned to live except, it seemed, a life that wasn’t depressed.’
‘Caring and good and not ironic’, Dennis’s contentment with who he is and where he is in life stands in sharp contrast to the constant desire Jules harbours to be something she’s not – his outburst at the end perhaps typifying the underlying current of the book better than anything else:
And specialness – everyone wants it. But Jesus, is it the most essential thing there is? Most people aren’t talented. So what are they supposed to do – kill themselves?
What similarly emerges as a striking theme throughout The Interestings is the characters’ dismissal of meaningful work as an alternative to creative pursuits. Jonah constructs robotic limbs for disabled people, but his job leaves him ‘feeling slightly empty’, while Jules is a much-loved therapist but is still ‘disappointed in how she ended up’. Ethan, by virtue of his highly lauded animations that were turned into a monumentally successful series, Figland, and Ash with her critically acclaimed feminist plays, are instead catapulted to the enviable standard they believe everyone should strive for – perhaps exposing society’s obsession with bohemians and its undervaluing of practical occupations that make very tangible contributions to people’s lives.
Wolitzer uses the swirling vortex of her six characters’ intersecting lives to explore weightier issues, many of which are still relevant today despite The Interestings being predominantly set in the 1970s and 80s. Rape, sexism, parental neglect, child exploitation, the miscarriage of justice, drug abuse, and mental illness feature throughout the narrative, although references are at times clunky – such as juxtaposing a Take Back the Night march in 1976 with the SlutWalks of the present day. Most of the time, however, Wolitzer is in fine form – her depiction of the group’s uniform reaction after hearing that their friend was raped typifying the victim blaming that so often takes place. Among the allusions to divisive issues are oblique markers of the time – the group’s collective hatred of Ronald Reagan, that time ‘cilantro was briefly everywhere’, and the first time AIDS reared its head in the form of a ‘big purple dot’ on a mutual friend.
At the heart of Wolitzer’s tale is her ability to elevate the ordinary into something important and worth reading about. Her passages on how Jules battles with Dennis’s depression will resonate with anyone who has ever found themselves in that very difficult position; the veracity of her portrayal is a perfect illustration of how melancholy often besets those living with a mentally ill person and how different a person becomes when struggling with depression:
She felt almost ill from the claustrophobia of living with a depressed person, someone who didn’t have a job now, and who slept too much, and who shaved only when he couldn’t bear not to.
Meanwhile, what anchors the story isn’t the marriages forged along the way but the lifelong friendship of Jules and Ash, as Wolitzer exalts the value of immensely close female companionship: ‘Talking to Ash now, telling her about Dennis, was in its own way almost as pleasurable as going to bed with Dennis had been.’
And therein perhaps lies the power of The Interestings – by making her protagonist a ‘shy, suburban nonentity’ who did nothing more than build friendships, marry the love of her life and listen to people’s problems for a living, Wolitzer is saying it’s okay to eschew talent and be ordinary, because after all, which one of us is really ordinary, and who gets to define what being special really means?
Meg Wolitzer The Interestings Vintage 2014 PB 480pp $19.99
Sonia Nair is a Melbourne-based business journalist and freelance arts writer. She tweets at @son_nair
You can buy this book from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.
To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here. SMSA members can check the Library here.
