“Once you started toasting people, you had made the complete transition to full-throttle adulthood.”
“Everyone tended to believe everything was their fault; maybe it was just hard to imagine, when you were still fairly young, that there were some things in the world that were just not about you.”
“There were the signed, spiral-bound Spirit-in-the-Woods yearbooks form three summers in a row and the aerial photograph of everyone at camp the second summer. In it, Ethan’s feet were planted on Jules’s head, and Jules’s feet were planted on Goodman’s head, and so on and so on. And didn’t it always go like that - body parts not quite lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop and you couldn’t stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.”
Wow. I don’t know if I’ve found a book so compelling in a long time, and yet I’m not even sure why I was compelled. It’s not an “exciting” book at all, and while there’s a clear beginning, I’m not sure I understand the ending. Most books focus on character development from start to finish. The character has a problem, the character struggles specifically due to said problem, character overcomes the problem, character is wiser. While there is plenty of that in The Interestings, the central focus is more on relationship development, and how relationships grow, struggle, change, and strengthen (or fall apart) because of changes in the individuals’ health, social status, past actions, etc.
Officially, the story follows the arc of six teenagers who meet and befriend each other at an arts-based summer camp, and the entirety of the book follows the changes in their relationships as they go from teenagers to college students to adults, from teens to single people to coupled people to married people with families. In actuality, the story focuses primarily on three of these friends, with the other three largely just informing the situations and mindsets of the first three. The book captures the idealistic teenage sense that these six teenagers, at a prestigious arts camp, were all destined to be special, to be “interesting.” The book explores what exactly it means to be “interesting” as the friends age and face the realities of growing up, getting jobs, and starting families.
The premise sounds a bit dull, but one example of the evolution of relationships is when two of the friends get married and become hugely successful, far outstripping the rest in prestige and wealth. How does a friendship adjust? Does it adjust? For one of the characters, and I know speaking for myself as well, the unfortunately consequence is this intense jealousy. Not to mention the fact that, at one point, all six of these people were at the same camp, supposedly on equal footing in talent. Why did these two make it and others didn’t?
Jules, the main perspective in the novel, feels this jealousy eat away at her, but her husband Dennis, frequently established as a simple, ordinary, hard-working man, eventually gets fed up. “Specialness - everyone wants it. Most people aren’t talented. So what are they supposed to do - kill themselves?” It speaks to a larger reality, that arguably there are very few who are truly “special” or “interesting” in our life. Does that make the “ordinary” people less valuable, somehow? Why should the ideas of being “special” or “interesting” be restricted to large endeavors consumed by large audiences? The husband of the successful couple, Ethan, is the creator and lead animator for a hugely successful cartoon program. The wife, Ash, is the director of a theater group specializing in female empowerment and feminist plays. Everyone sees them, Everyone knows them. Are those the other criteria required to be “interesting”? Dennis, meanwhile, serves in a simple, not exactly lucrative, but necessary job, and he helps provide for his family, including his and Jules’s daughter, Rory. Does he have any less value because there are far fewer people who know his name?
I just finished the book, so I’m still not entirely sure what to make of the end of the novel being Ethan’s death from cancer. Ethan was by far the most talented of the six friends, but he was one of the first two of them to die. He was arguably the most interesting, but his ending was the same as every other person. The third quote above is the last line in the book. The first interpretation I can work out (and maybe this’ll change for me over time as I think about it more) is that arguably no one is interesting because, at the end of the day, you know enough to know how every person’s story ends. However, I as the reader was definitely compelled to know these characters’ stories anyway. I found relatable qualities in most of them, and in Jules’s case I most definitely identified with her struggles to be “good enough,” to feel like she had to be “special,” and her jealousy at seeing her close friends become so successful, not even necessarily because she felt they didn’t deserve it, but because she was feeling left behind by some of the most important people in her life. I felt this bond, and perhaps at the end of the day that’s what it takes to be interesting to other people: a connection.
