"Jealously was essentially, 'I want what you have,' while envy was 'I want what you have, but I also want to take it away so you can't have it.'"
This wistful tale of "The Interestings" follows a group of teens who meet at a summer art camp and -- improbably -- remain friends deep into middle age, with tragedies alternately bringing them together and pushing them apart.
The novel explores the loss of innocence, how nostalgia paints our experiences, and the relationship between who we are and who we might have become.
"This was the world they were meant to enter: a world of fuckers."
Meg Wolitzer alternates points of view, but she mostly relies on Jules -- an aspiring actress-turned-therapist -- as her narrator, with resulting questions about how much we can trust her point of view.
"When you looked closely at anything, you could almost faint, Jules thought, although you had to look closely if you wanted to have any knowledge at all in life."
Despite some glossed-over experiences and a tendency toward soliloquies and coincidences, "The Interestings" achieves a kind of beauty as a commentary on the true meaning of friendship, love -- and what does or does not make us actually interesting.
"'When you have a child,' she'd recently said to Jules, 'it's like right away there's this grandiose fantasy about who he'll become. And then time goes on and a funnel appears. And the child gets pushed through that funnel, and shaped by it, and narrowed a little bit. So now you know he's not going to be an athlete. And now you know he's not going to be a painter. Now you know he's not going to be a linguist. All these different possibilities fall away.'"
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