There is the beautiful, open-hearted Ash her moody, enigmatic brother Goodman sensitive musician Jonah emotional dancer Cathy and the brilliant animator Ethan. Jules, a plain middle class girl from Long Island who just lost her father to cancer, is attending the camp on scholarship and is immediately smitten with her new artistic friends and their upper-class Manhattan lives. The Interestings has an ensemble cast, but its lead is Jules Jacobson, who in the summer of 1974 finds herself inducted into the cool kid inner circle at Spirit in the Woods, a New England summer camp for privileged children. When considered as a whole, the pieces don’t fit together in an organic, satisfying way. But its ambitions also exceed Wolitzer’s strengths the book suffers from odd pacing, random shifts in perspective, and haphazard leaps in time. It is compelling when it offers a sustained, ground-level view through one of her character’s eyes, which comprises the bulk of the book. At four hundred eighty pages, and covering forty years of half a dozen lives, its ambition is both broad and admirable. Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings is a beast of a book.
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