A Book A Week - Week 16: The Interestings

This week's book:
    The Interestings   by  Meg Wolitzer

Grade:    A

Huh. This is the first 'A' I've given to fiction since Week 9: The Perks of Being a Wallflower.  I have to say, I enjoyed this book very, very much.  And that surprised me very, very much.

Let me 'splain.  I chose this book because it wasn't a book I'd normally read.  Normally I like my fiction to... I don't know... move.  To have things happening.  To take me out of my regular life and set me somewhere else.  I want my fiction to be masculine, I suppose.  All about purpose and goals and what have you, bearded fiction with steely eyes and big shoulders.  This book, however, is the exact opposite of that.  This book is very feminine, all about examining the unexamined life, about trying to make sense of the relationships people have with one another and how those relationships change over time.  Not exactly my cup of tea.  At least, not that I knew before now.

I really like this book.  Yeah, it's weird to me too.

Meg Wolitzer is an excellent writer, and I only say that because I can't think of an adjective that means 'better than excellent' and still get my point across.  Her prose hangs together like it had always been there and she just discovered it and decided to let others see what she found.  It is, at first glance, the story about friends and how their lives either work out well, or terribly, or just kind of go along at the same mediocre pace.  Underneath, however, you'll find an assessment of the place of art in society, and how the value of art does not necessarily match the value of commercial success.
   It's a meander, reading this book, going from place to place and time to time, but I never got bored.  I was immediately invested in the characters and their lives, and I was eager to see how things would play out for them in the end.  These were real people to me, all of them, and even when a few of the characters became wildly more successful than their old friends at camp the situation felt perfectly plausible and real.
   The author starts the story at the beginning, back at sleep-away art camp in the 70's, and ends in the present day, but in between the narrative takes wide shifts in time.  With other books, this device feels forced, a purposeful obfuscation on what would otherwise be a linear narrative, but with 'The Interestings' it's a necessity, and it works.  Going back and forth is necessary because, taken linearly, the story would seem like it was barreling towards an inevitable conclusion.  This is a compliment, because once you learn the entire story, it seems like there's no other way things could have worked out.  Taken in bits and pieces, out of time order, the author lets the reader sneak up on the truth the story lays out.  Pretty clever.

Because the author is a writing instructor, I will allow myself two pieces of nit-picky criticism:
     I found a few places in the middle of the narrative where the POV shifts focus from character to character within the same scene, and a few times from paragraph to paragraph to paragraph.  Kind of jolting, to have one character be the focus and then have that focus moved to another few characters and back again in the space of two pages. 
     Also, the characters have the habit of sometimes telling rapid-fire jokes, like this was an episode of the to-me-impenetrable 'Gilmore Girls.'  The author reins in the tendency, but I happen to really, really hate cleverness for its own sake, and sometimes this crept in.  And it wasn't always entirely in character.

Who should read this book?  Well, everybody.  If you're a woman you're going to love it, I think.  Yes, that sounds sexist, but, as I mentioned above, this is a very feminine book, and there are no spies or aliens or international peril but lots of interpersonal interaction, and tons of secret-keeping, and older characters looking back on their younger selves.  But I also think that if you're a man you'll love it too, if only because I did and this is so far out of my genre comfort zone it might as well have been in a different language.
   Buy the damn book, already.

Next week:
   White Bread   by  Aaron Bobrow-Strain
   This is not fiction, this really is about white bread.  Stick with me, I think is going to be very interesting.  Seriously.