GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

But as they reach adulthood, even though the characters are, for the most part, rather chilly, especially teenaged protagonist Jules, things begin happening so fast that the book becomes a lot more fun to read.

The characters, their personalities, and every situation are described in such detail (often with surprising precision) that you can picture everything perfectly, as if watching an expertly-shot movie that spans decades, and therefore end up caring about these people and what will happen to them.

In my opinion, no one thing happens that becomes the main focus or arc of the book.

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Wolitzer explores her themes seriously, but there's also enough lightness, pace and wit that it's easy to tear through the book in a day. As the story opens the reader is exposed to a gaggle of young teenagers, all who meet at "Spirit-in-the-woods" summer camp in Belkamp Massachusetts, run by Manny and Edie Wunderlich, two aging socialists. We observe their lives - some mundane (small) and some famous (big). It’s an American story ruled by classic English themes.

Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) Thick, sentimental and with a narrative bestriding four decades, Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings feels above all like a Victorian novel, one which finds itself as comfortable in our time as it would have been 150 years ago.

As she looks back, the reader follows the evolution of the group.

After viewing product detail pages, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. For the first 400 pages or so, I couldn't put it down. ‧ It’s as if, in a novel based around quiet diminuendos, a character who threatens to disrupt the tone must be quarantined in the deep freeze of northern Europe. Much of the novel is about failed ambition and the burning desire to be special, and how this desire can flicker to nothing under a range of forces, not least economics, disposition and ‘the most daunting and most determining force of all, luck’. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. For one thing, to Jules’ surprise, Goodman’s grieving sister Ash and Ethan become an unlikely but devoted couple. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

Jules is one of the main characters in the novel, and one of her biggest struggles is contentment and envy. I still don't know how I feel about this book, Reviewed in the United States on October 1, 2014. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie.

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Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed. She has argued that sprawling novels by women rarely make it into the "top tier of literary fiction", and while this one isn't flawless, it deserves attention. Disabling it will result in some disabled or missing features.

Independent Premium Comments can be posted by members of our membership scheme, Independent Premium. This novel lives up to its name; Wolitzer’s perceptive portraiture makes these ordinary lives very interesting indeed. I've often thought of myself and some of my friends as potential "The Interestings" when we were younger, but have grown into something much less.

10,944 reviews.

We can’t all be exceptional – and anyway, as Jules realises, “it had never just been about talent; it had also always been about money”. Meg Wolitzer writes about people, talented people and rather ordinary people. The novel jumps back and forth in time at the beginning of the novel, but eventually settles into a straightforward story to the end.

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The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer – review A well-turned novel follows a group of friends from teenagehood to middle age and satirises the American religion of self-creation Jamesian spirit … Your recently viewed items and featured recommendations, Select the department you want to search in, Reviewed in the United States on November 8, 2019. Book Review: 'The Interestings,' By Meg Wolitzer | Life Goes On Summer After Summer Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings follows a group of teens who meet in … There are a few big things left hanging.

Please be respectful when making a comment and adhere to our Community Guidelines. The cover describes the group of people who name themselves The Interestings very well, because some are more outgoing than others and some are quiet, while a few of the characters who become close friends enmesh and blend in with each other's lives over the greater part of four decades. Fate, coincidence, class and envy are what bind — and in some cases disperse — the six central characters. She also pulls off an impressive balancing act, sometimes inhabiting the moment-to-moment present of her characters, and at other times writing with a droll hindsight. The prose was banal. Go to College, Keep Your Friends, Have Fights, Write a Novel, Brit Bennett Wrestles With Identity in New Novel, Brit Bennett on the ‘Wildest Week’ of Her Life. Timely and interesting material. "The Interestings" by Meg Wolitzer is a long, ambitious novel with a wide scope of themes and covers four decades starting in 1974.

At first I didn’t like this book, finding the six Interestings to be rather shallow and even a bit snotty. In her doorstopper of a novel, Meg Wolitzer follows the lives of six friends – from summer camp in 1974 to the present day, Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile.

A failed dancer, she eventually overcomes being raped by Goodman to become a financial guardian of her Cantor-Fitzgerald-like employees after 9/11.

Secrets are kept for decades among the six “Interestings”; resentments are nursed; loyalties are tested with mixed results. Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned.

You can find our Community Guidelines in full here. Ambitious and involving, capturing the zeitgeist of the liberal intelligentsia of the era. First published on Sun 1 Sep 2013 00.06 BST. Engaging Bittersweet Tale of "Campland" Friends, Reviewed in the United States on April 3, 2014.

Available for everyone, funded by readers. A ‘dandeliony, poodly outsider’, she sees greatness all around her. I thought the characters were well developed, mostly, and the writing is great, but I’m not sure I could outline a plot for you. And also, given the chance - would you want to try and go back and re-create a happy, distant past chapter in your life? The novel traces their lives from the time Jules joins the group to the present day. Cathy, who wants to dance, becomes Goodman’s girlfriend. 480, £ …

Although he and Jules are immediately soul mates, she rejects his physical advances, unable to work up any sexual attraction. Comments must be approved to be posted.

We observe their lives - some mundane (small) and some famous (big). The scene in which Stella adopts her white persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. And Wolitzer’s unflinching, omniscient gaze makes the reader look right in the eye of some unpleasant human traits – from envy that makes you hate your best friends, to a shameful parental disappointment in your child, to the double-think that justifies lying to your husband. If you are in the age range of these characters, chances are you have contemplated these types of thoughts...I really enjoyed the story and the characters and the background settings of camp and contemporary NYC. Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed. So here’s the young Jules’s idealistic fervour for her new-found friendships: “Feelings could come over you in a sudden wild sweep … they could return to the boys’ tepee, the six of them, and take their places in that perfect, unbroken, lifelong circle.” Wolitzer is good on teenage intensity, resisting the temptation simply to satirise it, but not going too gooey either. Wolitzer handles our expectations with flat calm; Goodman isn’t dead, in prison, or damaging other women — he’s in Iceland, doing nothing much. In "The Interestings" she follows the fate of several individuals from their early teens to adulthood.

Ash and her brother, Goodman, represent a hip city life which seems to beckon Jules, while also causing her to glance regretfully at her own small-town mother and sister. Highest in Jules’s affections is Ash, a pretty girl with a rich family in New York.

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