Reviews with content warning for Rape - The Interestings

I have a whole lot of thoughts about this book, which frankly is probably the best thing about it. It did make me think, and I have a lot to say about it, even though I don't think I would say I enjoyed it very much.

First off, the writing. There are some things about the writing here that I find painfully irritating and terrible - some of which have been mentioned in other reviews. The way Wolitzer describes sex and sexual encounters and sexual thoughts is just BIZARRE and clinical and emotionless. I'm not sure what she was going for with that, because the rest of the writing is very fluid, emotional, and a little dreamlike, steeped in nostalgia and yearning, and then these sexual scenes are aggressively literal, concrete, factual, which not only take you out of the potential emotional weight of any sex scene, but also kind of take you out of the entire story as a whole.

Another thing I found irritating about the writing was that sometimes, the non-chronology was so fucking annoying that I'd skip entire pages just so the conversation that was ostensibly happening would continue. The general non-chronological nature of the storyline is mostly fine, and works very well to keep you interested (nyuck) in the progress of the characters, but there are these little loops of non-chronological storytelling, stories within stories, and they are fucking exhausting to read. A character will ask a question, and then Wolitzer will go on a page and a half discussion of something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT, and then return to the question and the response from another character. Similarly, a character might say, "Remember the thing we did?" and then we'd get a page long explanation of what they did, and then the other character would reply. It felt like wasting time and ink.

One more irritating non-chronological thing that's less stylistic and more about temporal setting is that something would happen, and Wolitzer would add something like, "This happened, and they didn't yet know that Nixon was a criminal." Like, yeah, and? It was this weird choice to like, remind us that time passes and things were happening outside the friend group, but it was utterly pointless. What, like outside their friend group is interesting? Interesting things are happening beyond their little big lives? Sure, I guess, but we're in this story with these characters, so like, briefly mentioning 9/11 towards the end of the book seems a little irrelevant.

Anyway lots of the non-chronological choices were just bad and grating.

Otherwise I found the writing to be eminently readable. A lot less dense and overwrought than I expected, frankly. It read much faster than I expected. I worried that this would be a slog due to the writing style, but it was only a slog due to the painfully boring lack-of-plot.

The characters were the plot, and unfortunately, as many people have noted, the characters aren't actually interesting. Yes, yes, the point is that they're only interesting to themselves because they can't see outside themselves, but that isn't really the best vibe for a novel, is it?

Is the question of their interestingness answerable by actions? The way they spend their time? Or something inherent in their personalities? I think that the most interesting character - the one I want to know more about - is the one with comparatively very little page time: Jonah. Jonah, who's gay and is briefly taken in by a cult and many other *interesting* life experiences, has probably the second-least page time of six-person Interestings summer camp group. (The least page-time is Cathy, the girl whose primary function in the text is to have boobs, get raped, and "ruin" their friend group.)

The amount of time spent on Jules (mostly the main character) and Goodman (objectively the fucking worst) is depressing and exhausting because they're both so intensely boring, predictable, and just shitty. Goodman is an unapologetic rapist and eager to throw his life away as a rich fuckup. We spend an inordinate amount of time mourning him, despite the fact that he's *a rapist* and the hypocrisy of the characters about it is nearly unbearable. Jules is a petty, jealous, brown-noser who thinks she's better than other poor people because she went to a fancy arts summer camp as a teenager. She carries that attitude for over thirty years, like, god, grow up.

I suppose I expected a bit more high drama from a book titled The Interestings. This is an insular, quieter novel about normal, shitty people being boring and obsessed with themselves. The ~point~ of the novel, that being interesting is subjective, is very obvious very early on in the book. When you finally reach that point, where Jules finally realizes at least a fragment of this knowledge, it is such a relief that it almost works as revelation, even though you've been yelling it at her for 400 pages.

I suppose I do appreciate parts of this book, though. The general topic of art, being interesting, and the relationship of that pull to the rest of the world is something I feel deeply inclined towards. I'm glad to have it discussed in fiction a bit, even if I found these particular characters insufferable. I wanted to sympathize with them, to root for them and their projects. I wanted them to be my friends, and to watch some of them succeed and fail with my hopes bound up in them as well, like I do with my real friends. But they are too self-absorbed as characters to let other people in. They are too obsessed with themselves and each other be interesting.

Content Warnings

definebookish's review against another edition

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emotional reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

I was always going to love this one; that much was obvious from the start. The story of six friends who meet at a Jewish summer camp for the arts in 1974, it’s about the ways in which their destinies diverge as adults, even while individual bonds between them largely remain strong. If I had to review it in six words I’d write “For fans of The Dutch House” and leave it at that.

At the centre of the story is aspiring actress Jules Jacobsen, whose presence at camp in 1974 was made possible by a scholarship. She becomes best friends with beautiful, wealthy Ash, and soon draws the attention of homely Ethan, but can’t reciprocate his feelings for her. Later, after an initial struggle to make it as an actress in New York City, she resigns herself to a more pedestrian career path; Ethan and Ash go on to become incredibly successful.

Some of the more negative reviews I’ve read dismiss The Interestings as being about an unlikeable character’s unlikeable bitterness, but that’s not how it reads to me. To me it’s about how life happens to people – how we open and close doors and how doors are opened and closed to us by talent, perseverance, ecomics, biology, trauma. How having any kind of specific hope or dream for your life is taking an emotional risk. While this absolutely isn’t a comprehensive consideration of all of the factors that make or break artistic success, it is a nuanced and complex one.

Is it perfect? I suppose that depends on your point of view, like everything else. It’s messy, and the characters say insensitive things and behave in ways that real people behave, which won’t always equate to the reader’s own ethical or moral boundaries. Occasionally it rams a point home a little too hard. But it’s also sympathetic, and often relatable, and surprisingly epic in scope. I don’t often feel that I know fictional characters in the same way I know actual humans, but by the end of this I did.

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