I didn’t like Jules, she was grasping and obnoxious.

I loved it- amazing! It reminded me of Donna Tartt- the NYC setting, the beautiful writing.

I might have liked it better if it was shorter.

I had a hard time with this because there were a lot of descriptions of ugly things, a lot of unpleasantness.

After 500 pages I didn’t feel like I knew the characters well. Do we value being interesting more than anything?

I loved the premise- following 6 people throughout their lives.

Here are some of the initial comments readers made while explaining their votes.

We had a wonderful discussion of The Interestings as this novel received a variety of reviews with three thumbs up votes, three so-so’s, and one thumbs down. 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. 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. 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. Her friend Jonah, a gifted musician, stops playing the guitar and becomes an engineer.

Jules Jacobson, an aspiring comic actress, eventually resigns herself to a more practical occupation and lifestyle. 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.

In The Interestings, Wolitzer follows these characters from the height of youth through middle age, as their talents, fortunes, and degrees of satisfaction diverge. Decades later the bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable. On Thursday, February 11 th, Fixed on Fiction met to discuss The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer.

The interestings wolitzer