135: The Interestings
Rating: ☆☆☆☆1/2
Recommended by:
Author: Meg Wolitzer
Genre: Fiction
468 pages, published April 9, 2013
Reading Format: Audio Book
Summary
During the summer of Nixon’s resignation, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts meet, become bonded as friends and dub themselves “the Interestings,” based on their self assessment that they are all the most interesting people. The bond remains strong for several of this group as we follow their lives from angsty teenage years to middle age. The kind of creativity that is rewarded at age fifteen is not always enough to make a life during your twenties, thirties and especially beyond that. Jules Jacobson, an aspiring comic actress, eventually resigns herself to a more practical occupation and lifestyle as a therapist. Her friend Jonah, a gifted musician and son of a famous folk singer, stops playing the guitar after a childhood betrayal and becomes a design engineer. Ethan and Ash, Jules’s now-married best friends, become incredibly successful—true to their initial artistic dreams, with the wealth and access that allow those dreams to keep expanding. How their success plays out among their friends makes this book interesting.
Quotes
“But, she knew, you didn’t have to marry your soulmate, and you didn’t even have to marry an Interesting. You didn’t always need to be the dazzler, the firecracker, the one who cracked everyone up, or made everyone want to sleep with you, or be the one who wrote and starred in the play that got the standing ovation. You could cease to be obsessed with the idea of being interesting.”
“People could not get enough of what they had lost, even if they no longer wanted it.”
“Part of the beauty of love was that you didn’t need to explain it to anyone else. You could refuse to explain. With love, apparently you didn’t necessarily feel the need to explain anything at all.”
“She recognized that that is how friendships begin: one person reveals a moment of strangeness, and the other person decides just to listen and not exploit it.”
“But clearly life took people and shook them around until finally they were unrecognizable even to those who had once known them well. Still, there was power in once having known someone.”
“Ordinary father-daughter love had a charge to it that generally was both permitted and indulged. There was just something so beautiful about the big father complementing the tiny girl. Bigness and tininess together at last – yet the bigness would never hurt the tininess! It respected it. In a world in which big always crushes tiny, you wanted to cry at the beauty of big being kind of and worshipful of and being humbled by tiny. You couldn’t help but think of your own father as you saw your little girl with hers.”
“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?”
“We are all here, on this earth for only one go around. And everyone thinks their purpose is to just find their passion. But perhaps our purpose is to find what other people need.”
“Because the truth is, the world will probably whittle your daughter down. But a mother never should.”
“The child who was happy with herself meant the parents had won the jackpot.”
“Dennis was present, still present, and this, she thought as she stayed landed against him, was no small talent.”
“But this post-college world felt different from everything that had come before it; art was still central, but now everyone had to think about making a living too, and they did so with a kind of scorn for money except as it allowed them to live the way they wanted to live.”
“After a certain age, you felt a need not to be alone. It grew stronger, like a radio frequency, until finally it was so powerful that you were forced to do something about it.”
“If someone said ‘diametrically,’ could ‘opposed’ be far behind?”
“Everyone simply had to wait patiently in order to lose the people they loved one by one, all the while acting as if they weren’t waiting for that at all.”
“Jealousy was essentially “I want what you have,” while envy was “I want what you have, but I also want to take it away so you can’t have it.”
“When do I stop? When I’m twenty-five? Thirty? Thirty-five? Forty? Or right this minute? Nobody tell s you how long you should keep doing something before you give up forever.”
“The only option for a creative person was constant motion—a lifetime of busy whirligigging in a generally forward direction, until you couldn’t do it any longer.”
“You sometimes heard about the marginally talented wives of powerful men publishing children’s books or designing handbags or, most commonly, becoming photographers. There might even be a show of the wife’s work in a well-known but slightly off gallery. Everyone would come see it, and they would treat the wife with unctuous respect. Her photographs of celebrities without makeup, and seascapes, and street people, would be enormous, as though size and great equipment could make up for whatever else was missing.”
“The love between a brother and sister just over a year apart in age held fast. It wasn’t twinship, and it wasn’t romance, but it was more like a passionate loyalty to a dying brand.”
My Take
I thoroughly enjoyed listening to The Interestings and at the end felt like I had spent quality time inside the lives of the four main characters whose lives intersect and develop 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 impact a friendship and a life.
