The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer

 

Book Summary(via Goodreads):

 

The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable. Decades later the bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. In The Interestings, Wolitzer follows these characters from the height of youth through middle age, as their talents, fortunes, and degrees of satisfaction diverge.

The kind of creativity that is rewarded at age fifteen is not always enough to propel someone through life at age thirty; not everyone can sustain, in adulthood, what seemed so special in adolescence. Jules Jacobson, an aspiring comic actress, eventually resigns herself to a more practical occupation and lifestyle. Her friend Jonah, a gifted musician, stops playing the guitar and becomes an engineer. But Ethan and Ash, Jules’s now-married best friends, become shockingly successful—true to their initial artistic dreams, with the wealth and access that allow those dreams to keep expanding. The friendships endure and even prosper, but also underscore the differences in their fates, in what their talents have become and the shapes their lives have taken.

Wide in scope, ambitious, and populated by complex characters who come together and apart in a changing New York City, The Interestings explores the meaning of talent; the nature of envy; the roles of class, art, money, and power; and how all of it can shift and tilt precipitously over the course of a friendship and a life.

 

This insomniac's opinion:

 

Huh. Funny thing about the group of young people in this novel that decide to name themselves 'The Interestings'. They are not, even a little, interesting. Sigh.

 

I am quite unsure how this novel is getting so much buzz. The writing is perfectly lovely but there is not a single character that stands out and makes the novel fascinating. Add in the fact that the plot is slow-moving and almost non-existent and you have yourself a painfully tedious read. Blah.

 

Worth staying up all night to read?

 

Nope.

 

Rating: 2 1/2 stars rounded up for Goodreads