The Interestings: A Novel [Paperback]

“Remarkable . . . With this book [Wolitzer] has surpassed herself.”—The New York Times Book Review

A victory . . .The Interestingssecures Wolitzer's place among the best novelists of her generation. . . . She's every bit as literary as Franzen or Eugenides. But the very human moments in her work hit you harder than the big ideas. This isn't women's fiction. It's everyone's. —Entertainment Weekly(A)

TheNew York Times–bestselling novel by Meg Wolitzer that has been called genius (The Chicago Tribune), “wonderful” (Vanity Fair), ambitious (San Francisco Chronicle), and a “page-turner” (Cosmopolitan), whichThe New York Times Book Review says is among the ranks of books like Jonathan Franzen’sFreedomand Jeffrey EugenidesThe Marriage Plot.

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. InThe 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 talelƒ6