The Interestings

by Meg Wolitzer

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable. Decades later the bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. In The Interestings, Wolitzer follows these characters from the height of youth through middle age, as their talents, fortunes, and degrees of satisfaction diverge.

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. Jules Jacobson, an aspiring comic actress, eventually resigns herself to a more practical occupation and lifestyle. Her friend Jonah, a gifted musician, stops playing the guitar and becomes an engineer. But Ethan and Ash, Jules's now-married best friends, become shockingly successful-true to their initial artistic dreams, with the wealth and access that allow those dreams to keep expanding. 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.

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.

Release date: April 9, 2013

Publisher: Riverhead Books

Print pages: 560

Sample

 ONE

 

On a warm night in early July of that long-evaporated year, the Interestings gathered for the very first time. They were only fifteen, sixteen, and they began to call themselves the name with tentative irony. Julie Jacobson, an outsider and possibly even a freak, had been invited in for obscure reasons, and now she sat in a corner on the unswept floor and attempted to position herself so she would appear unobtrusive yet not pathetic, which was a difficult balance. The teepee, designed ingeniously though built cheaply, was airless on nights like this one, when there was no wind to push in through the screens. Julie Jacobson longed to unfold a leg or do the side-to-side motion with her jaw that sometimes set off a gratifying series of tiny percussive sounds inside her skull. But if she called attention to herself in any way now, someone might start to wonder why she was here; and really, she knew, she had no reason to be here at all. It had been miraculous when Ash Wolf had nodded to her earlier in the night at the row of sinks and asked if she wanted to come join her and some of the others later. Some of the others. Even that wording was thrilling.

Julie had looked at her with a dumb, dripping face, which she then quickly dried with a thin towel from home. Jacobson, her mother had written along the puckered edge in red laundry marker in a tentative hand that now seemed a little tragic. “Sure,” she had said, out of instinct. What if she’d said no? she liked to wonder afterward in a kind of strangely pleasurable, baroque horror. What if she’d turned down the lightly flung invitation and went about her life, thudding obliviously along like a drunk person, a blind person, a moron, someone who thinks that the small packet of happiness she carries is enough. Yet having said “sure” at the sinks in the girls’ bathroom, here she was now, planted in the corner of this unfamiliar, ironic world. Irony was new to her and tasted oddly good, like a previously unavailable summer fruit. Soon, she and the rest of them would be ironic much of the time, unable to answer an innocent question without giving their words a snide little adjustment. Fairly soon after that, the snideness would soften, the irony would be mixed in with seriousness, and the years would shorten and fly. Then it wouldn’t be long before they all found themselves shocked and sad to be fully grown into their thicker, finalized adult selves, with almost no chance for reinvention.

That night, though, long before the shock and the sadness and the permanence, as they sat in Boys’ Teepee 3, their clothes bakery sweet from the very last washer- dryer loads at home, Ash Wolf said, “Every summer we sit here like this. We should call ourselves something.”

“Why?” said Goodman, her older brother. “So the world can know just how unbelievably interesting we are?”

“We could be called the Unbelievably Interesting Ones,” said Ethan Fig-man. “How’s that?”

“The Interestings,” said Ash. “That works.”

So it was decided. “From this day forward, because we are clearly the most interesting people who ever fucking lived,” said Ethan, “because we are just so fucking compelling, our brains swollen with intellectual thoughts, let us be known as the Interestings. And let everyone who meets us fall down dead in our path from just how fucking interesting we are.” In a ludicrously ceremonial moment they lifted paper cups and joints. Julie risked raising her cup of vodka and Tang—“V&T,” they’d called it—nodding gravely as she did this.

“Clink,” Cathy Kiplinger said.

“Clink,” said all the others.

The name was ironic, and the improvisational christening was jokily pretentious, but still, Julie Jacobson thought, they were interesting. These teenagers around her, all of them from New York City, were like royalty and French movie stars, with a touch of something papal. Everyone at this camp was supposedly artistic, but here, as far as she could tell, was the hot little nucleus of the place. She had never met anyone like these people; they were interesting compared not only with the residents of Underhill, the New York suburb where she’d lived since birth, but also compared with what was generally out there, which at the moment seemed baggy suited, nefarious, thoroughly repulsive.

Briefly, in that summer of 1974, when she or any of them looked up from the deep, stuporous concentration of their one-act plays and animation cels and dance sequences and acoustic guitars, they found themselves staring into a horrible doorway, and so they quickly turned away. Two boys at camp had copies of All the President’s Men on the shelves above their beds, beside big aerosol cans of Off! and small bottles of benzoyl peroxide meant to dash flourishing, excitable acne. The book had come out not long before camp began, and at night when the teepee talk wound down into sleep or rhythmic, crickety masturbation, they would read by flashlight. Can you believe those fuckers? they thought.

This was the world they were meant to enter: a world of fuckers. Julie Jacobson and the others paused before the doorway to that world, and what were they supposed to do—just walk through it? Later in the summer Nixon would lurch away, leaving his damp slug trail, and the entire camp would watch on an old Panasonic that had been trundled into the dining hall by the owners, Manny and Edie Wunderlich, two aging Socialists who were legendary in the small, diminishing world of aging Socialists.

Now they were gathering because the world was unbearable, and they themselves were not. Julie allowed herself another slight degree of movement, crossing and recrossing her arms. But still no one turned and insisted on knowing who had invited this awkward, redheaded, blotchy girl in. Still no one asked her to leave. She looked around the dim room, where everyone was mostly inert on the bunks and on the wooden slats of the floor, like people in a sauna.

Ethan Figman, thick bodied, unusually ugly, his features appearing a little bit flattened, as if pressed against a mime’s invisible glass wall, sat with his mouth slack and a record album in his lap. He was one of the first people she’d noticed after her mother and sister drove her up here days earlier. He had been wearing a floppy denim hat then, and he greeted everyone around him on the lawn, grabbing the ends of trunks, allowing himself to be smashed into platonic hugs with girls and soul handshakes with other boys. People cried out to him, “Ethan! Ethan!” and he was pulled toward each voice in turn.

“That boy looks ridiculous,” Julie’s sister, Ellen, said quietly as they stood on the lawn, fresh out of their green Dodge Dart and the four-hour drive from Underhill. He did look ridiculous, but Julie already felt the need to be protective of this boy she didn’t know.

“No he doesn’t,” she said. “He looks fine.”

They were sisters, only sixteen months apart, but Ellen, the older one, was dark-haired, closed-faced, and held surprisingly condemnatory opinions, which had often been dispersed in the small ranch house where they lived with their mother, Lois, and, until that winter, their father, Warren, who had died of pancreatic cancer. Julie would always remember what sharing close quarters with a dying person had been like; particularly what it had been like sharing the single, peach-colored bathroom that her poor father had apologetically monopolized. She had begun to get her period when she was fourteen and a half—much later than anyone else she knew—and she found herself in need of the bathroom at times when it wasn’t available. Huddling in her bedroom with an enormous box of Kotex, she thought of the contrast between herself, “emerging into womanhood,” according to the movie that the gym teacher had shown the girls much earlier, in sixth grade, and her father, emerging into something else that she didn’t want to think about but which was upon her at all times.

In January he was dead, which was a grinding torment and also a relief, impossible to focus on or stop thinking about. Summer approached, still unfilled. Ellen didn’t want to go anywhere, but Julie couldn’t just sit at home all summer feeling like this and watching her mother and sister feel like this; it would lead to madness, she decided. At the last minute, her English teacher suggested this camp, which had an open spot and agreed to take Julie on scholarship. Nobody in Underhill went to camps like this one; not only wouldn’t they have been able to afford it, it wouldn’t have occurred to them to go. They all stayed home and went to the local bare-bones day camp, or spent long days oiled up at the town pool or got jobs at Carvel or loafed around their humid houses.

No one really had money, and no one ever seemed to think much about not having money. Warren Jacobson had worked in human resources at Clelland Aerospace; Julie had never understood exactly what his job entailed, but she knew that the pay wasn’t enough to allow the family to build and maintain a pool in their small backyard. Yet when she was suddenly offered a chance to go away to this camp in the summer, her mother insisted she accept. “Someone should have a little fun in this family,” said Lois Jacobson, a new, shaky widow at age forty-one. “It’s been a while.”

Tonight, in Boys’ Teepee 3, Ethan Figman seemed as confident as he’d been on the lawn that first day. Confident, but also probably conscious of his own ugliness, which would never go away over the whole of his life. On the surface of the record album, Ethan began rolling joints with efficiency. It was his job, he’d said, and he clearly liked having something to do with his fingers when there was no pen or pencil held between them. He was an animator, and he spent hours drawing his short animated films and filling the pages of the little spiral notebooks that always bulged from his back pocket. Now he took tender care with the tiny shovelfuls of grain and twig and bud.

“Figman, increase the velocity; the natives are restless,” said Jonah Bay. Julie knew almost nothing yet, but she did know that Jonah, a good-looking boy with blue-black hair that fell to his shoulders, and a leather string around his neck, was the son of the folksinger Susannah Bay. For a long time, his famous mother would be Jonah’s primary identifying characteristic. He had taken to indiscriminately using the expression “the natives are restless,” although this time it did make partial sense. Everyone here was restless, though none of them were native to this place.

That night in July, Nixon was still over a month away from being lifted off the White House lawn like a rotten piece of outdoor furniture. Across from Ethan, Jonah Bay sat with his steel-stringed guitar, wedged between Julie Jacobson and Cathy Kiplinger, a girl who moved and stretched all day in the dance studio. Cathy was big and blond and far more womanly than most girls could be comfortable with at age fifteen. Also she was “way too emotionally demanding,” as someone bluntly later observed. She was the kind of girl who boys never left alone; they were relentless in their automatic pursuit of her. Sometimes the outline of her nipples would appear through the fabric of a leotard like buttons on a sofa cushion, and they would need to be ignored by everyone, the way nipples often needed to be ignored in their vicissitudes.

Up above them all, on a top bunk, sprawled Goodman Wolf, six feet tall, sun sensitive, big kneed, and hypermasculine in khaki shorts and buffalo sandals. If this group had a leader, he was it. Literally, now, they had to look up to him. Two other boys who actually lived in this teepee had been politely but emphatically asked to go get lost for the night. Goodman wanted to be an architect, Julie had heard, but he never spent time figuring out how buildings stayed up, how suspension bridges withstood the weight of cars. Physically he was not quite as spectacular as his sister, for his good looks were a little muddied by troubled, stubbled skin. But despite his imperfections and his general air of laziness, he was a huge and influential presence here. The previous summer, in the middle of Waiting for Godot, Goodman had climbed into the lighting booth and plunged the stage into darkness for a full three minutes just to see what would happen—who would scream, who would laugh, how much trouble he’d get into. Sitting in the dark, more than one girl secretly imagined Goodman lying on top of her. He would be so big, like a lumberjack trying to fuck a girl—or, no, more like a tree trying to fuck a girl.

Much later, people who’d been at camp with him agreed that it made sense that Goodman Wolf was the one whose life had such an alarming trajectory. Of course they were surprised, they said—though not, they made sure to qualify, all that surprised.

The Wolfs had been coming to Spirit-in-the-Woods since they were twelve and thirteen; they were central to this place. Goodman was big and blunt and unsettling; Ash was waifish, openhearted, a beauty with long, straight, pale brown hair and sad eyes. Some afternoons in the middle of Improv, when the class was talking in a made-up language, or mooing and baaing, Ash Wolf would suddenly slip away from the theater. She would return to the empty girls’ teepee and recline on her bed eating Junior Mints and writing in her journal.

I’m beginning to think I feel too much, Ash wrote. The feelings flood into me like so much water, and I am helpless against the onslaught.

Tonight the screen door had winced shut behind the departing, shooed- away boys, and then the three girls from the other side of the pines had arrived. There were six people altogether in this single-bulb-lit conical wooden structure. They would meet again whenever they could over the rest of the summer, and frequently in New York City over the next year and a half. There would be one more summer for all of them. After that, over the following thirty-odd years, only four of them would meet whenever they could, but of course it would be entirely different.

Julie Jacobson, at the start of that first night, had not yet transformed into the far better sounding Jules Jacobson, a change that would deftly happen a little while later. As Julie, she’d always felt all wrong; she was gangling, and her skin went pink and patchy at the least provocation: if she got embarrassed, if she ate hot soup, if she stepped into the sun for half a minute. Her deer- colored hair had been recently permed at the La Beauté salon in Underhill, giving her head a poodle bigness that mortified her. The stinking chemical perm had been her mother’s idea. Over the year in which her father was dying, Julie had occupied herself by zealously splitting her split ends, and her hair had become frizzed and wild. Sometimes she discovered a single hair with an uncountable number of splits, and she would tug on the whole thing, listening to the crackle as the hair broke between her fingers like a branch, and experiencing a sensation that resembled a private sigh.

When she looked in the mirror one day, her hair appeared to her as bad as a pillaged nest. A haircut and a perm might help, her mother said. After the perm, when Julie saw herself in the salon mirror, she cried, “Oh crap,” and ran out into the parking lot, her mother chasing her, saying it would die down, it wouldn’t be so big tomorrow.

“Oh honey, it won’t be so dandeliony!” Lois Jacobson called to her from across the blinding rows of cars.

Now, among these people who had been coming to this teenaged performing-arts and visual-arts summer camp in Belknap, Massachusetts, for two or three years, Julie, a dandeliony, poodly outsider, from an undistinguished town sixty miles east of New York City, was surprisingly compelling to them. Just by being here in this teepee at the designated hour, they all seduced one another with greatness, or with the assumption of eventual greatness. Greatness-in-waiting.

Jonah Bay dragged a cassette tape deck across the floor, as heavy as a nuclear suitcase. “I’ve got some new tapes,” he said. “Really good acoustic stuff. Just listen to this riff, it will amaze you.” The others dutifully listened, because they trusted his taste, even if they didn’t understand it. Jonah closed his eyes as the music played, and Julie watched him in his state of transfixion. The batteries were starting to die, and the music that emanated from the tape player seemed to come from a drowning musician. But Jonah, apparently a gifted guitarist, liked this, so Julie did too, and she nodded her head in an approximation of the beat of the music. More V&Ts were served by Cathy Kiplinger, who poured one for herself in a collapsible drinking cup, the kind you took on campouts and which never really got clean, and which, Jonah remarked, looked like a miniature model of the Guggenheim Museum. “That’s not a compliment,” Jonah added. “A cup isn’t supposed to collapse and reconstruct. It’s already a perfect object.” Again, Julie found herself nodding in quiet agreement with everything that anyone here said.

During that first hour, books were discussed, mostly ones written by spiky and disaffected European writers. “Günter Grass is basically God,” said Goodman Wolf, and the two other boys agreed. Julie had never actually heard of Günter Grass, but she wasn’t going to let on. If anyone asked, she would insist that she too loved Günter Grass, although, she would add as protection, “I haven’t read as much of him as I would like.”

“I think Anaïs Nin is God,” Ash said.

“How can you say that?” said her brother. “She is so full of pretentious, girly shit. I have no idea why people read Anaïs Nin. She’s the worst writer who ever lived.”

“Anaïs Nin and Günter Grass both have umlauts,” remarked Ethan. “Maybe that’s the key to their success. I’m going to get one for myself.”

“What were you doing reading Anaïs Nin, Goodman?” asked Cathy.

“Ash made me,” he said. “And I do everything my sister says.”

“Maybe Ash is God,” said Jonah with a beautiful smile.

A couple of them said that they had brought paperbacks with them to camp that they needed to read for school; their summer reading lists were all similar, featuring those sturdy, adolescent-friendly writers John Knowles and William Golding. “If you think about it,” said Ethan, “Lord of the Flies is basically the opposite of Spirit-in-the-Woods. One’s a total nightmare, and the other’s utopia.”

“Yeah, they’re diametrically opposed,” said Jonah, for this was another phrase he liked to use. Although, Julie thought, if someone said “diametrically,” could “opposed” be far behind?

Parents got discussed too, though mostly with tolerant disdain. “I just don’t think that my mother and father’s separation is any of my business,” said Ethan Figman, taking a wet suck on his joint. “They are completely wrapped up in themselves, which means they basically pay no attention to me, and I couldn’t be happier. Though it would be nice if my father kept some food in the refrigerator once in a while. Feeding your child—I hear it’s the latest fad.”

“Come to the Labyrinth,” said Ash. “You’ll be totally taken care of.” Julie had no idea what the Labyrinth was—an exclusive private club in the city with a long, twisting entrance? She couldn’t ask and risk showing her ignorance. Even though she didn’t know how she had come to be included here, the inclusion of Ethan Figman was equally mysterious. He was so squat and homely, with eczema running along his forearms like a lit fuse. Ethan didn’t take his shirt off, ever. He spent free- swim period each day under the boiling tin roof of the animation shed with his teacher, Old Mo Templeton, who had apparently once worked in Hollywood with Walt Disney himself. Old Mo, who looked eerily like Gepetto from Disney’s Pinocchio.

As Julie felt the effects of Ethan Figman’s wet-ended joint, she imagined all their saliva joining on a cellular level, and she was disgusted by the image, then she laughed to herself, thinking: we are all nothing more than a seething, collapsing ball of cells. Ethan, she saw, was looking at her intently.

“Hmm,” he said.

“What?”

“Telltale private chuckling. Maybe you want to slow down a little over there.”

“Yeah, maybe I should,” Julie said.

“I’m keeping an eye on you.”

“Thanks,” she said. Ethan turned back to the others, but in her precarious, high state she felt that Ethan had made himself her protector. She kept thinking a high person’s thoughts, focusing on the collage of human cells that filled this teepee, all of it making up the ugly, kind boy; and the ordinary nothing that was herself; and the beautiful, delicate girl sitting across from her; and the beautiful girl’s uncommonly magnetic brother; and the soft- spoken, gentle son of a famous folksinger; and, finally, the sexually confident, slightly unwieldy dancer girl with a sheaf of blond hair. They were all just countless cells that had joined together to make this group in particular— this group that Julie Jacobson, who had no currency whatsoever, suddenly decided she loved. That she was in love with, and would stay in love with for the rest of her life.

Ethan said, “If my mother wants to abandon my father and screw my pediatrician, let’s pray he’s used soap and water after he’s had his hand up some kid’s ass.”

“Wait, Figman, so we’re supposed to assume that your pediatrician puts his hand up all his patients’ asses, including yours?” Goodman said. “I hate to tell you this, man, but he’s not supposed to do that. It’s against the Hippocratic oath. You know, ‘First, do no hand up the ass.’ ”

“No, he doesn’t do that. I was just trying to be disgusting to get your attention,” said Ethan. “It’s my way.”

“So, okay, we get it; you are disgusted by your parents’ separation,” said Cathy.

“Which is not something Ash and I can relate to,” said Goodman, “because our parents are as happy as clams.”

“Yup. Mom and Dad practically tongue kiss in front of us,” said Ash, pretending to be appalled but sounding proud.

The Wolf parents, glimpsed briefly by Julie on the first day of camp, were vigorous and youthful. Gil was an investment banker at the new firm Drexel Burnham, and Betsy his artistically interested, pretty wife who cooked ambitious meals.

“The way you act, Figman,” Goodman continued, “is all ‘I don’t give a shit about my family,’ but in fact a shit is given. In fact you suffer, I think.”

“Not to move the conversation away from the tragedy of my broken home,” said Ethan, “but there are far bigger tragedies we could discuss.”

“Like what?” said Goodman. “Your weird name?”

“Or the My Lai massacre?” said Jonah.

“Oh, the folksinger’s son brings up Vietnam whenever he can,” said Ethan.

“Shut up,” said Jonah, but he wasn’t angry.

They were all quiet for a moment; it was perplexing to know what to do when atrocity suddenly came up against irony. Mostly, apparently, you were supposed to pause at that juncture. You paused and you waited it out, and then you went on to something else, even though it was awful. Ethan said, “I’d like to say for the record that Ethan Figman is not such a terrible name. Goodman Wolf is much worse. It’s like a name for a Puritan. ‘Goodman Humility Wolf, thy presence is requested at the silo.’”

Julie, in her stoned state, had the idea that all this was banter, or the closest they could get to banter at their age. The level of actual wit here was low, but the apparatus of wit had been activated, readying itself for later on.

“There’s a girl in our cousin’s school in Pennsylvania,” Ash said, “named Crema Seamans.”

“You made that up,” Cathy said.

“No, she didn’t,” Goodman said. “It’s the truth.” Ash and Goodman looked suddenly earnest and serious. If they were performing a synchronized, sibling mindfuck, they had worked out a convincing routine.

“Crema Seamans,” Ethan repeated thoughtfully. “It’s like a soup made from . . . various semens. A medley of semens. It’s a flavor of Campbell’s soup that got discontinued immediately.”

“Stop it, Ethan, you’re being totally graphic,” said Cathy Kiplinger.

“Well, he is a graphic artist,” said Goodman.

Everyone laughed, and then without warning Goodman jumped down from the upper bunk, shuddering the teepee. He planted himself on the bed at Cathy Kiplinger’s feet, really on her feet, causing her to sit up in annoyance.

“What are you doing?” Cathy said. “You’re crushing me. And you smell. God, what is that, Goodman, cologne?”

“Yes. It’s Canoe.”

“Well, I hate it.” But she didn’t push him off. He lingered, taking her hand.

“Now let’s all observe a moment of silence for Crema Seamans,” Julie heard herself say. She hadn’t planned to say a word tonight; and as soon as she spoke, she feared she’d made a mistake inserting herself into this. Into what? she thought. Into them. But maybe she hadn’t made a mistake. They were looking at her attentively, assessing her.

“The girl from Long Island speaks,” said Goodman.

“Goodman, that comment makes you seem kind of horrible,” said his sister.

“I am kind of horrible.”

“Well, it makes you seem kind of Nazi horrible,” said Ethan. “As if you’re using some sort of code to remind everyone that Julie’s Jewish.”

“I’m Jewish too, Figman,” said Goodman. “Just like you.”

“No, you’re not,” said Ethan. “Because even though your father is Jewish, your mother isn’t. You have to have a Jewish mother, or else they will basically throw you off a cliff.”

“The Jews? They aren’t a violent people. They didn’t commit the My Lai massacre. I was just playing around,” Goodman said. “Jacobson knows that, right? I was just goofing on her a little, right, Jacobson?”

Jacobson. She was excited to hear him call her that, though it was hardly what she’d imagined a boy might ever call her. Goodman looked at her and smiled, and she had to prevent herself from standing up and reaching out to touch the planes of his golden face; she’d never spent so much time this close to a boy who looked as magnificent as he did. Julie didn’t even know what she was doing as she lifted her cup again, but he was still watching her, and so were the rest of them.

“O Crema Seamans, wherever thou art,” she said loudly, “your life will be tragic. It will be cut short by an accident involving . . . animal desemenizing equipment.” This was a suggestive, nonsensical remark that included a made-up word, but there were approval sounds from around the teepee.

“See, I knew there was a reason I invited her in,” said Ash, turning to the others. “ ‘Desemenizing.’ Go, Jules!”

Jules. There it was, right there: the effortless shift that made all the difference. Shy, suburban nonentity Julie Jacobson, who had provoked howls for the first time in her life, had suddenly, lightly changed into Jules, which was a far better name for an awkward-looking fifteen- year- old girl who’d become desperate for people to pay attention to her. These people had no idea of what she was usually called; they’d hardly noticed her in these first days of camp, though of course she’d noticed them. In a new environment, it was possible to transform. Jules, Ash had called her, and instantly the others followed Ash’s lead. She was Jules now, and would be Jules forever.

Jonah Bay pulled at the strings of his mo