Interestings (Wolitzer) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
[The Interestings] soars, primarily because Wolitzer insists on taking our teenage selves seriously and, rather than coldly satirizing them, comes at them with warm humor and adult wisdom.
Elle


You’ll want to be friends with these characters long after you put down the book.
Marie Claire


[A] big, juicy novel.... Wolitzer’s finger is unerringly on the pulse of our social culture.
Readers Digest


In the “nefarious, thoroughly repulsive” summer of 1974, 15-year-old Julie Jacobson, “an outsider and possibly even a freak” from the suburbs, gets a scholarship to an arts camp and falls in with a group of kids—the aptly self-named “Interestings.” Talented, attractive, and from New York City, to Julie they are “like royalty and French movie stars.” There Julie, renamed Jules, finds her place, and Wolitzer her story: the gap between promise and genuine talent, the bonds and strains of long friendships, and the journey from youth to middle age, with all its compromises, secrets, lies, and disparities.... While Wolitzer is adept at switching between past and present, and showing the different fears that dog Jules at different ages, the problem is that the Interestings are never quite as interesting as this 464-page look at them requires them to be.
Publishers Weekly


Wolitzer's latest novel follows a group of creative types from the beginning of their friendship as teenagers through middle age. Hipsters before their time, they dub themselves The Interestings, in an effort at pretentious irony.... Verdict: The novel skips back and forth, revealing information about each member of the group and covering their triumphs and tragedies over the course of the years. Ultimately, the work hits its own ironic note: Julie's successful and creative friends are far more normal than she'd ever realized. This is certain to attract readers of literary and smart women's fiction.  —Mara Dabrishus, Ursuline Coll. Lib., Pepper Pike, OH
Library Journal


Wolitzer follows a group of friends from adolescence at an artsy summer camp in 1974 through adulthood and into late-middle age as their lives alternately intersect, diverge and reconnect. Middle-class suburban Julie becomes Jules when a group of more sophisticated kids from Manhattan include her in their clique at Camp Spirit-in-the-Woods in upstate New York.... After this first idyllic summer, the novel cuts to 2009 when Jules, now living a modest middle-class life as a therapist married to a medical technician....tries not to envy her friend's success. Secrets are kept for decades among the six "Interestings"; resentments are nursed; loyalties are tested with mixed results. Ambitious and involving, capturing the zeitgeist of the liberal intelligentsia of the era.
Kirkus Reviews