The Interestings in What's the Name of That Book???

Mar 03, 2013 Melinda Worfolk rated it it was amazing

Shelves: women-authors, strong-women, fiction, lgbtq-plus, 2010-2014

I enjoyed this very much and was sorry when it was over. The characters are interesting and, although they are not always likeable, they are very human and mostly endearing despite their flaws. The book is told in third person, primarily from the point of view of Julie, later rechristened Jules, an awkward, out of place teenager who falls in with a group of creative friends at a summer camp for the arts in 1974. The novel follows this group through the next 30-odd years, as they finish high scho I enjoyed this very much and was sorry when it was over. The characters are interesting and, although they are not always likeable, they are very human and mostly endearing despite their flaws. The book is told in third person, primarily from the point of view of Julie, later rechristened Jules, an awkward, out of place teenager who falls in with a group of creative friends at a summer camp for the arts in 1974. The novel follows this group through the next 30-odd years, as they finish high school, then university, fall in love, have families, start and change careers. Some of the characters are more troubled than others, and a few quite dramatic things happen (this is revealed in the opening chapters, though the nature of the drama is not explained until later). I liked having the long view that Wolitzer provides.

I quite enjoy Meg Wolitzer's writing; she has a good eye for small details and knows how to gloss over the things that aren't really that important to the kind of story she wants to tell. I found her descriptions of the characters very evocative--yes, you get a sense of what they look like, but really when she is providing a physical description, she is conveying not so much an objective description of what the person looks like, but rather a hard-to-describe quality of how that person is perceived by others and, almost more importantly, how they perceive themselves. Wolitzer is also excellent at describing the feeling one gets from looking back at youth from middle age and the dangers of being seduced into wishing you could be a teenager again while ignoring the reality that there is plenty to be celebrated in our growth into maturity and more understanding than we have when we are in our teens or young adulthood.

If you like novels that follow a close-knit friend group through the arc of their lives, you will like this. There's enough action and excitement to prevent it from seeming like a boring blow-by-blow of everyday life, but there is also enough of the quotidian to help an ordinary person relate to the characters.

*****
May 18th, 2013

I am really enjoying this so far. It's the sort of book I like: takes place over a span of many years, changes point of view between a few characters who are close with each other, takes place primarily in New York City.

It's taking me a while to finish, so it's overdue. My apologies to any of my local friends who might have a hold on it at the public library...I'm the reason you don't have it yet! But it'll be worth the wait. ...more

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Jan 02, 2014 Hope rated it liked it

3.5 stars, maybe closer to 4... I don't know. I WANTED to love it. I loved the writing, but I just spent the whole book wishing Jules would just GET OVER IT already and stop living in the past. I just wanted her to be satisfied with her own life, and I hope I'm not spoiling anything by saying she NEVER IS. It's nearly 500 pages of a middle-aged woman wishing she were 16 again. I suppose that was the point, but to me it was bit torturous. ...more

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Mar 19, 2016 Selma rated it liked it

Shelves: fiction

An ambitious character study that rises above its odd plot (premise: adolescents who meet at summer camp remain lifelong friends), but goes on for far too long.

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Dec 30, 2015 Marigold rated it liked it

Shelves: literary-fiction, fiction-2010-2020

Three and a half. I enjoyed it, even though in short it's a novel about privileged people worrying about their privileged New York City lives. On the back of the paperback, the NY Times book review compares it to The Marriage Plot by Eugenides, & in my opinion this book far surpasses that one. This, at least, is just a novel about people, and not a pretentious effort to be anything more. I liked some of the characters & enjoyed following them across the years from 1974 to near present day. Not s ...more

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Mar 30, 2013 Melissa Rochelle rated it liked it

Shelves: arc, marriage, read-2013

I trudged through this book. I was invested in the characters and wanted to know their story, but it was painfully slow. I probably won't read another Meg Wolitzer...just not my kind of book. ...more

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