The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer

After reading Lauren Groff's Arcadia last month, a novel about people with whom I found it hard to relate to at all, I was thrilled to read Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings.  From the first chapter I thought "Now, these are my people."

For one thing, most of the characters were my age (ok, they were one year older than me, but at my age that doesn't count.)  For another thing, although I never went to a summer camp for talented teenagers like they did (I never went to a summer camp at all), I did spend my high school years surrounded by people talented in The Arts.   And ... at the age of 14 I made friends for life, just like they did - there is still a group of close friends I get together with on a regular basis.  And ... while I recognized very early (by the end of high school) that I didn't have enough talent to make a living in The Arts (and so gave up playing the piano altogether) I still always wished I could have.

Among my group of high school friends, two of them majored in theater, one of whom is a working actor in Chicago.  I have no illusions that it is an easy life but I love to hear her talk about it when we get together.  People I knew from high school musical productions went on to Broadway and among that group, one of the nicest of them (then, and he still seems to be) is a successful Grammy and Emmy award winning Broadway producer, composer and musical director.

So, I very much could relate to Jules, the principal character in this novel who spends the summer of 1974, the summer that Richard Nixon resigned, at a camp for talented artistic kids, making friends for life.  One of her friends, Ethan, becomes incredibly successful as a cartoonist, eventually creating a television series as long running as The Simpsons and making tons of money.

Jules and Ethan date during that summer of 1974 but Jules finally tells Ethan that she likes him but "not like that".  They stay very close friends through their lives though, and Ethan marries Jules' best friend from camp, Ash.  Ash is an actress who really wants to direct feminist plays.  I'm not giving much away here, we find out all of this in the first two chapters of this long novel.   Another friend, Jonah, is a talented musician, the son of a famous folk singer from the 60's.  Jonah doesn't want to pursue a career in music.   Another friend, Cathy, is a talented dancer, but unfortunately she has the wrong body-type to succeed as a professional dancer.   And then there is Ash's brother, Goodman, who is charismatic but lacks, to say the least, direction.  These 6 kids decide that they will be friends for life and dub themselves, only semi-ironically, "The Interestings".

The novel jumps around in time: 1974 in chapter one, then 2009 in chapter two, and then back in time to the early 1980's.  This was clever of Wolitzer.  She sets up Jules as the Everywoman we can relate to at the camp and in Chapter 2 we find out that Jules is still the Everywoman out of the group.  Jules and her wonderful, but very ordinary, husband Dennis have a good marriage and Normal Careers as a therapist (Jules) and a medical tech (Dennis).   Meanwhile we also find out in Chapter Two, via Ash and Ethan's Christmas Letter, that Ash and Ethan are fabulously wealthy and now married to each other with kids.  How did that happen, we wonder.   And do Jules and Dennis receive The Christmas Letter simply because they are on a very long list of recipients that includes people who long ago were friends?  No, we discover that Jules and Ash are still best friends and talk to each other all the time.   But that doesn't mean that Jules isn't jealous of Ethan and Ash's successful lives. 

Jules spends much of her life thinking that she is uninteresting because she leads a Normal Life and not a life in The Arts.  She loves her husband despite, or maybe because, of the fact that he is so normal.  And at one point, in a moment of truth between them, Dennis dares to tell Jules that her friends really aren't that interesting. Wolitzer doesn't shy away from showing what hard work a good marriage is.  In fact, the life of Jules could have been the subject of a Small Novel, otherwise known as a Woman's Novel.  In fact, Wolitzer could have written a Small Novel about any one of the characters.  Or she could have written a series of Small Novels that would, eventually, cover the same characters and their lives.  But instead she chose to write a Big Novel.  And it is big - in length, in scope and in ideas.

The story Wolitzer chooses to tell spans many decades - the years between the resignation of Nixon through the AIDS epidemic, the 90's bubble years, the fall of the Towers and the financial crisis of 2008, ending in the present day as the friends enter their mid 50's. One of the things I liked was that each of these historical events happens off stage, it isn't dwelled on by Wolitzer.  Jules remembers that the camp was brought together to watch Nixon leaving office - but there is no actual scene in the novel depicting that moment. The fall of the Towers isn't shown.  The AIDS epidemic is introduced to the characters exactly as I remember being introduced to it in the early 1980's - the characters hear that someone who was gay suddenly died and there is no real explanation why.  Only later when AIDS was identified did you suddenly realize "Oh, he died of AIDS. Oh. "

This is also a Big Novel in the sense of having a lot of characters.  Besides the six campers who become friends for life, and Dennis, we meet Ash and Goodman's parents, who impose a family secret on Ash that she shares only with Jules (Ash's father is an investment banker at Drexel Burnam and I waited throughout the novel for its fall to happen.) We catch glimpses of Jules' widowed mother and sister Ellen.  There is the elderly couple who run the camp.  There is Jonah's Japanese American lover who is HIV positive, as well as Jonah's folk singer mother.   There are even Moonies.

But what makes this a Big Novel is that it is a novel that explores a Big Idea - an exploration of talent and lack of talent and and the affect of talent, and its lack, on those with talent and the people around them.  It also explores the relationship between talent and money (and the lack of money). Can friendship survive unequal wealth?   Can marriage?  Jules must deal with the fact that she really isn't talented, while her friends are.  Ash, on the other hand, is talented but could certainly never support herself on that talent - the fact that she came from a wealthy family and is married to the even wealthier Ethan allows her to become a director of small, critically acclaimed feminist off-Broadway plays.  Ash is talented but Jules is aware that Ash's ability to use her talent is dependent on her being supported by Ethan. This doesn't seem to bother Ash - but if Jules was married to Ethan would it have bothered her?

Ethan is a generous soul and is willing to help out Jules and Dennis, but that bothers Jules.  How much can you accept from wealthier friends in order to be able to travel in the same circles before the friendship is threatened?  Do you let them always pick up the tab at dinner?  Do you let them pay for vacations to fantastic places?  Do you let them give you gifts of money?  (I was pleased that Wolitzer was smart enough to frame this question as a gift of cash and not a loan.  In my experience - loans are much harder on friendships, making clear that one friend is indebted to the other friend in ways other than monetary.  A gift is ... a gift.)

Wolitzer also asks us to consider the price paid by a person who stifles real talent.  Jonah is a natural musician but because of an incident that occurred to him as a child, he refuses to allow himself to be even an amateur musician and while he develops a successful career in robotics he does not find it fulfilling.  Cathy, the dancer, knows early on that she will not be a dancer because of her physique and instead becomes a successful businesswoman.  Is she fulfilled?  We don't know because the friends lose touch with Cathy after a terrible incident.  And then there is Goodman.  Did he ever really have talent or did everyone just assume he did because he was so charismatic?

Only Ethan, naturally talented, manages through hard work and some luck and good advice, to become successful beyond everyone's wildest dreams. He is also generous.  On the other hand, Ethan becomes a workaholic and is ashamed of how he reacts to adversity in his own personal life.

At one point Ethan decides to use his wealth to bring "good" to the world by fighting child labor in Asia.  Ethan is one of the Most Powerful People in the World.  Is Ethan's high profile use of his wealth any more "good" than Jules' work with her low income therapy patients?  Why are good works by the wealthy valued more than the good that is brought by the less wealthy as part of their daily lives?  Why does Jules value her work less than Ethan's work?

And, finally,  is a novel about Big Ideas like these, written over a broad scope of time with many characters, inherently more worthy than a  Small Novel about only Jules and Dennis and the many issues of their daily lives that Wolitzer might have written?  It seemed to me, as I finished this novel, that this final question is the disguised-in-plain-sight biggest of the Big Ideas of this novel.  If Wolitzer leaves us wishing for more about Cathy or Ash or even Ash's mother Betty (or, for that matter, even about Jules' mother), she leaves us hungry for the kind of Small Novels that sometimes get characterized as Women's Fiction.  This is a wonderful Big Novel, but that doesn't make it more worthy than smaller novels.  It does however probably make it more marketable to what is known as a wider audience.  An audience that includes men.

Wolitzer is certainly aware of this.  And this Big Novel is certainly being marketed in a way that won't automatically turn men off.  Wolitzer must be aware of this too.  She wrote a New York Times Book Review essay last year  in which she pointed out how novels by women are often marketed as "women's" novels when novels written by men about the same subject matter are called universal stories.  She also noted that the cover art of novels written by women often make it unlikely a man will want to pick it up to read.

The Interestings has, I presume due to this very essay, gender neutral cover art.  When I went to my local Barnes and Noble to pick up a copy, the clerk assuredly led me over to where it was supposed to be shelved - but it wasn't there.  Puzzled, he looked it up on his computer.  It had just come out; he remembered shelving it.  "Well," he said, looking up at me, "it's already sold out."   I didn't mind waiting for the next shipment.  I just hope some of those early buyers were men. 

April Reading (and Television Viewing)

April was not a great month for me for reading, at least in terms of volume.  In fact, looking back on the month, I'm a little shocked to find that I only finished four books last month.   Here they are:

1.  Lean In, by Sheryl Sandberg.   I wanted to read this book but I also needed to read it because the women at my firm decided to have a discussion about it at a brown bag lunch one day. And it turned out to be great discussion.

While I think that any woman could read this book and get something out of it, it clearly isn't directed to all women. Sandberg is pretty up front about that.   It will appeal more to women who see themselves in a career rather than a job, and will especially appeal to women like me who made the decision early on to climb some kind of ladder - either because that is what drives them or, like me, because I am in a career that is "up or out" (i.e. you either keep rising or you are asked to leave). Women whose priorities in life are not, and may never be, related to their job may not find themselves as interested in this book.

Our work discussion was great because all the women in the group were lawyers committed to practicing law for the rest of our lives.  While some have young children and have cut back on their hours temporarily, they do not see that as taking them off the career path (indeed it can't because, as I say, law firm life is generally "up or out" still, no matter how much people may deny that it still is).  These women fully expect to return to full time work when their kids are older.  And all of us, whether we have children or not, face the same issues during the work day.  When I say we discussed the book, it would be more accurate to say that we used the book as a jumping off place to discuss the many issues that we face every day in our work day. 

Sandberg does fill the book with a lot of helpful data (backed up by many pages of footnotes).  None of it was news to me but it was helpful to have it all in one place written in accessable language.  I found myself wishing that some of the MEN in my organization would read the book so that they could more fully understand what the women are up against from an institutional point of view.

I've read a lot of reviews of the book.  The negative reviews mostly seem to complain that it isn't a different book.  Many wished  that Sandberg had spent more time discussing how to change institutional barriers (and reviewers who say that she doesn't discuss them at all are totally off base - in fact, I found myself wondering if some of the people who wrote negatively about the book had even read the book.  Sandberg manages to touch on almost everything, she just doesn't explore everything).

This is definitely a book that focuses on women taking control of what they can control and helping them with some strategies for that.   That appeals to me and I found it appealed very much to the women in our discussion group.  But then, it would.  Women who go to law school tend to be self-starters, very independent, and, most of all, pragmatic.   We recognize that institutional barriers exist (oh trust me, we recognize it all the time) but, in the meantime, while we wait and hope and work toward removing them, we have to get on with our own careers.  Talking in practical terms about what we can do in the here-and-now to help those careers is always welcome.

I've gone back to one of reading groups I had temporarily dropped out of and they will be discussing this book next month.  It will be interesting to compare the discussions.  I recommend this book. 

2.   Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck.   As I said, I've returned to one of my reading groups and this was their choice this month.  I know that I've read Cannery Row before, many many years ago when I was on a John Steinbeck kick.  But I really didn't remember it, so it was all new to me.  I had a recollection that I loved the way Steinbeck wrote and wondered if I would feel the same 20 or 30 years later.  I did.  This novel is a series of vignettes of the people (most of whom are down on their luck but don't see it that way) living in a California coastal town whose main employer is the fish (sardine) canneries.   Not that any of these people work for the canneries except occasionally when they really need money. There isn't much in the way of plot, which is fine with me.  Lots of characterization - Steinbeck makes me think well of people who, if I met them in real life, I'd probably run away from.  And, oh how he can string together sentences.    Recommended.   Although if you've never read any Steinbeck, I'd recommend Grapes of Wrath instead.

3.  Ancient Lights, by John Banville.   I've been reading this through my NOOK app for a few months now.  It took me a long time to finish even though it is not a long book, partly because I used it as my lunchtime reading and I didn't have much time for lunch reading but also because I wanted to read it slowly.  Like Steinbeck, Banville is an expert at stringing together sentences.  I found myself re-reading paragraphs, sometimes aloud, just for the joy of his language (another reason it was hard to read at lunch unless I was alone).  There is, again, not much of a plot.   The book is written as a stream of consciousness memoir by an older character remembering the sexual relationship he had as a young boy with the mother of a friend of his (which at first gave me pause) combined with his more or less present day writing about a film he is in (he is an actor) and his thoughts on the death by suicide of his daughter.   I didn't realize until I reached the notes at the end that this novel is the third of a trilogy.  I might go back and read the first two books.  Recommended.

4.  Arcadia by Lauren Groff.   When I first started practicing law I worked with a woman who had lived in a commune in the 1970's.  I never talked about it with her, other people told me.  I remember thinking "How horrible.  I would never want to live in a commune." This novel about a boy who grows up in a commune in upstate New York was not, therefore, something that I expected to really find myself relating to.   And I didn't.  Groff did keep my interest through the first two sections which covered the main character's childhood and adolescence at the commune.  But it was downhill for me from there.  The third part takes place years later after the commune fell apart and his own marriage has fallen apart.  Since I couldn't see the joy of communal living and certainly didn't see the appeal of the character's missing unstable former drug addict wife, I kept waiting for him to come to his senses and just move on. The fourth part takes place in an apocalyptic near-future when the climate has changed so much that some food is no longer available and some kind of flu is wiping out much of the population.  I think it was 2018 (which I found hard to buy into since that is right around the corner).  I disliked that section intensely in terms of plot and characters.

Groff writes well which is why I kept going.  And I can't say that her characters were caricatures - she made them very real to me.  And she certainly didn't portray the commune as a utopia, nor did she portray it as a terrible place (at least not until the end).  Her portrayal seemed even handed to me.  The truth is that I have, and have always had, a viscerally negative reaction to the kind of people are most likely to think living in a commune is a good thing and especially to the kind of character who, after escaping from one, would actually miss it.  That's really just me and not a problem with Groff.  So while I can't recommend this novel since I mostly just wanted it to be over by the last part, people who don't have the kinds of issues I have might enjoy it.

And that was it for April.  One of the reasons I read fewer books was because I became caught up in a number of television series.  Oddly, all of them were on cable and I don't have cable.   But the descriptions intrigued me enough that I bought iTunes season passes for them.  They included:  (1)  Spies of Warsaw, based on a novel by Alan Furst that I read last year; (2) Top of the Lake, an original Sundance Channel series directed by Jane Campion, set in New Zealand and starring Elizabeth Moss and Holly Hunter; (3) Vikings, an original scripted drama from The History Channel (!) about, well, Vikings and based on Scandinavian sagas about Ragnor Lothboke; (4) Doctor Who ('nuff said); (5) Orphan Black an original BBC America series about a group of human clones all played by Tatiana Maslany; and (6) Defiance, set in a post-apocalyptic, post-alien invasion, St. Louis (how could I not watch it, if only to see how they kept the Arch still standing despite missing a chunk). I enjoyed and recommend all of them.

I wasn't wild about the novel Spies of Warsaw when I read it, I thought it moved kind of slowly and didn't have a real ending.  The television show is much better (and has more plot than the novel; I think I read somewhere that the screenwriters also used parts of other Furst novels), although it still moves slowly and doesn't have a real ending.   Top of the Lake reminded me a bit of Twin Peaks.  It was full of odd characters and, in many ways, the actual solution to the mystery wasn't all that important - although it did manage a few surprises for me at the end. 

I truly loved Vikings and am thrilled it is coming back next year.  It is violent but not gratuitously so - after all it's about ... Vikings!  Someday, someone should adapt Dorothy Dunnet's epic novel King Hereafter as a series.  It takes place about 200 years after this television show, during the late days of the Vikings, after Scandinavia becomes nominally Christian.

Of all the shows I've watched, the one I can't stop telling people to watch is Orphan Black.  Tatiana Maslany is doing amazing work playing human clones who look alike but have completely different personalities (including characters impersonating other characters).   In a just world she would get an Emmy.  And the story is odd and entertaining. I regularly think that this series is what Dollhouse should have been and wonder if Joss Whedon is watching it.  I might write about it when it is over.  HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

Defiance has just started and while it seems somewhat derivative of other science fiction shows, I love this kind of science fiction.  Hopefully, once the writers set the stage and establish all the characters it can develop a unique voice.  And they still haven't explained the Arch fix yet.

Doctor Who - well,  Doctor Who.  :)

March Reading

I'm a little late putting this up because ... well, I don't really have a reason or an excuse.

I ended up reading fewer books in March than the preceding months because I took a little over a week to re-watch the first season of Veronica Mars and then I took another week to re-watch the first five episodes of Bunheads.  Here's what I did read in March:

 1. NW by Zadie Smith. Believe it or not this is the first Zadie Smith novel I've ever read. I keep meaning to read her so when I saw this on the New Fiction shelf at the library I picked it up. I know it got mixed reviews but I quite liked it as a study of the lives of three people who grew up in the same estate (housing project) and never moved far.  I will definitely find and read another Zadie Smith novel.  Recommended.

2.  One Last Strike by Tony LaRussa.  This is a book about the surprising 2011 season of the St. Louis Cardinals.  I read it while I spent a weekend in Florida on spring break.  That seemed appropriate.  But despite being a huge Cardinals fan, I found this a surprisingly dull book.  Too many details and too little baseball "magic".   Not recommended.

3. Where's You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple.  I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this novel.  It is told as a young middle school aged girl tries to figure out why her mother disappeared by going through a file of emails and memos from the last months before the disappearance.  So it had a resemblance to an epistolary novel using emails.  I love epistolary novels because writers of letters (and emails) are always unreliable narrators.  For one thing, they are choosing a personality when they write - and that might not be their real personality or at least not their entire personality.   This novel kept me guessing.  And it was FUNNY in a snarky way.   Recommended.

4.  This is Running for Your Life by Michelle Orange.   I found this book of essays very uneven.  Some of the essays kept my interest and others made my mind wander.    Partially recommended - pick and choose.

5.  A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood.   I inadvertently read this very short novel over the two day period when the Supreme Court was considering gay marriage.  How appropriate!   I had seen the movie with Colin Firth and really enjoyed it.  The novel is wonderful.  I loved Isherwood's style. Highly Recommended.

6. Leaving Everything Most Loved by Jacqueline Winspear.   This is the latest Maisie Dobbs novel.  Winspear seemed to intend this book to be a transitional book.  I won't spoil anything but Maisie is definitely changing direction.  I continue to have a hard time warming up to Maisie as a character although I like Winspear's style and I like the period she is choosing to write about.  The last 25 pages or so of this novel were more rambling than I would have liked but the first part of the book was well written.  Recommended.

That was it for March.  I'm still slowly reading John Banville's Ancient Light.  It isn't that long of a book but I made it my "lunchtime reading" book and I haven't had much time to read over lunch.   I also have Lauren Groff's Arcadia on my night stand.