Book Review: epics and obsessions in Meg Wolitzer's 'The Interestings'

We are our obsessions. This might sound like an old Freudian cliché, but mankind (and womankind) have displayed a proclivity to repeat, heedlessly, irrational acts since Homer devoted the focus of the Iliad on the willfully self-destructive wrath of Achilles.

While Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings is not a conscious attempt to rewrite Homer, the two main characters act out their lives in ways that launch, if not a thousand ships, then at least a whole media empire and an ongoing love that spans many decades and life changes.

But let’s get serious. Even if cranky old Ezra Pound thought the epic was ‘a poem including history’ and even if some of the details of the novel tangentially reflect the lives of a few of what our current society have depicted as epic heroes (Steve Jobs and Matt Groening in particular), the changes in the way we tell stories puts the uncommon ‘common’ person at the center of our examining the ways we engage with others and ourselves. Joyce knew this almost a century ago when he recast Odysseus as Leopold Bloom, the common outsider Jew in a largely anti-Semitic Dublin of June 16, 1904. Many writers since have learned to find the heroic in the domestic to depict most tellingly the ‘tale of the tribe’. (Mallarme’s phrase on epic intentions).

portrait of Mallarme

The Interestings is indeed a tale of a tribe. The title refers to the group of people who meet at a summer camp and found the eponymous clique ‘the interestings’. The group consists of a bunch of insiders, those blessed to have attended the schools of the elect: Collegiate and Brearley and Stuyvesant those special New York schools that generate articles regularly in The New Yorker. Except for one. The main character, Jules Jacobson, is a Long Island outsider, a Jewish girl with curly hair and a jaw that pops. But she has a sense of humor. She also learns how to spin irony and a tepid coolness into a web that attracts the creative genius of the group, Ethan Figman.  He falls for her hard the way 17 year olds do, and the book is in large part the love story that lasts a lifetime but that according to the rules of physical engagement is not fully consummated. Except in art.

Freud wrote about displacement and Eros but the one who really wrote about the triangulation of love, which this book depicts, is the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Love is always deferred and displaced, a game of mirrors and shifting signifiers. And an endlessly complex interplay among the players. And this is only for starters in Lacan’s worldview. Known perhaps most for his statement “there is no sexual relationship", in this novel, his words are literally accurate for the two souls who weave the tapestry of the various characters who appear and react to the dangerous liaisons between teenagers.

Maud Gonne

Unrequited love has long has been a wellspring of the creative arts. The troubadour poets, Dante with his Beatrice, and Yeats with Maud Gonne all exemplify the way that love of an unrequited ideal as imagined (Or via the Imaginary in Lacanese), by a man, often spurs him to glory in words and in deeds.

I will not recount the twists and turns of what is, after all, a rather traditional set of plot twists. Instead, the obsessions are what make the book a wonderful read. In an interview with Bob Edwards, Meg Wolitzer says that following one’s obsessions is what makes us human. 

Obsessions begin early. For reasons all too complex (pun intended) we are genetically and experientially shaped into certain patters very early on. By the time someone is a teen-ager at a camp, the shape of the character is largely in place. And so the book outlines in detail how much of this fated play of life plays itself out. In the same Edwards’ interview Wolitzer references Michael Apted’s 7 Up series. The documentary is a treasure trove for psychologists and anthropologist as it depicts, in 7 year segments the growth of a disparate group of English children. The last one, when they are 56 has just recently been completed. In both the film and in Wolitzer’s novel, 'the child is the father of the man'. The character at 16 or 17 stays roughly in place.

And this is an important bit of wisdom. For those parents who are about to send their children off to camps or scampers around the globe or gifted opportunities at schools, it will potentially be a chance for the to find a clique of interestings themselves. But in order for this to happen the rules have to be pretty lax. The kids in the book get to smoke dope and have sex and do lots that young people do I relatively unsupervised. In the modern age of surveillance in which we live the chance to make deep relationships and stupid mistakes is often pretty limited. I leave it to others to decide if this is a step forward in the growth process or a step back into putting off the experimentation associated with youth.

We live much more these days in creating highly regulated structures for children and teenagers who aspire to great things. No longer are people permitted to get lost in the woods or in outside walks or in camps with coed visits at night. “The interestings’ clique might not be nearly as interesting if they had a more structured experience.

Much of the book outside of the lovingly detailed camp descriptions is plot driven. The details give way to quick examinations of binaries: money and the lack of it, talent and the lack of it, depression and passion, parents and children, disappointment and acceptance, remorse and forgiveness. etc. It is the camp, as Wolitzer has said, that is, even today her obsession. The intensity of feelings of first love and first intellectual passions have never left Wolitzer and never left some of the characters in her book. Jeffrey Eugenides’ blurb on the back of the book talks about the attainment of wisdom. Are the characters sadder and wiser by the end? Most certainly. But the ghosted faces of the teens that they were still shine through the inevitable losses and triumphs of the characters. For some the book will be a subtle confirmation for Sam Harris’ assertion that free will in a myth. For others it will be chance to reclaim the times when in their own lives when ‘the world was all before them’ to quote yet another epic. Milton’s “Paradise Lost” ends with Adam and Eve leaving the Garden and into the world of age and mortality. In some ways, The Interestings is another story of an exile from the garden, of the loss of a place in which there really was an innocence and a love of life that was without sin until-- the appled knowledge of sex, power,  and at times uncontrolled dark urges, sentence them to take their places in the world of time and the time of the world.