They were only fifteen, sixteen, and they began to call themselves the name with tentative irony. On a warm night in early July of that long- evaporated year, the Interestings gathered for the very first time.

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 successfultrue 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.

The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer