Jonah comes to terms with being gay at the start of the AIDS epidemic. Goodman, Ash’s wild-card brother, is accused of an act so heinous that he is forced to disappear. Then they become very rich because Ethan creates a popular long-running animated series in which he does several characters’ voices. Ethan and Ash pair off as a semi-incestuous Spirit-in-the-Woods couple. Wolitzer anoints her as such, but also because she winds up leading a tamer life than the others do. Jules is the book’s center not only because Ms. She also discovers irony, which “was new to her and tasted oddly good, like a previously unavailable summer fruit.” Right from the start the book’s heroine, Julie Jacobson, is renamed Jules by her fellow campers and feels excitingly like a completely reinvented person. And there’s something intrinsically sad about “The Interestings” too. But there’s something funnily incongruous about young New Yorkers going through their growing pains in rustic teepees. Wolitzer could make chalk-on-a-blackboard screeches with too much of this schoolkid affectation.
“I’m going to get one for myself,” Ethan says. The wit in the group, Ethan Figman, wonders whether umlauts aren’t what make Nin and Grass so special. They have adopted daring-seeming tastes because they are sick of being spoon-fed books like “Lord of the Flies” and “A Separate Peace” during the school year.
“The feelings flood into me like so much water, and I am helpless against the onslaught.”Īsh and her brother, Goodman, disagree vehemently about whether Anaïs Nin or Günter Grass is God. “I’m beginning to think I feel too much,” a girl named Ash writes in her journal. Surely she knows that self-dramatizing, narcissistic teenagers aren’t necessarily interesting, let alone Interesting with a capital I.īut she introduces these kids at a bohemian summer camp north of New York and lets them indulge their preening vanity to the fullest. This is a bravely embarrassing move for Ms. The principals in Meg Wolitzer’s heavily detailed new novel, “The Interestings,” are only in their midteens when they decide to give themselves the label of the title, hoping the nickname will stick for life.
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