Meg Wolitzer's 2013 novel follows six teenagers who meet at Spirit-in-the-Woods, an arts summer camp in the Berkshires in 1974, and tracks their friendships, rivalries, and diverging fortunes across the next four decades. It's a big, ambitious book about talent -- who gets recognized for theirs, who doesn't, and what that difference does to a friendship over a lifetime. The New York Times Book Review placed it in the company of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom and Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot, and it became a genuine bestseller. It also runs nearly 470 pages, and a real, recurring reader complaint is that a meandering middle stretch doesn't always earn its length. This review covers what critics actually said, the real Goodreads numbers, and where that length-and-pacing criticism actually comes from.
What The Interestings Actually Is
The novel opens in the summer of 1974 in a teepee at Spirit-in-the-Woods, where six teenagers -- Jules Jacobson, Ash Wolf, Ash's brother Goodman, Ethan Figman, Jonah Bay, and Cathy Kiplinger -- half-ironically nickname themselves "the Interestings." Jules, a suburban outsider from Underhill, New York, is invited into this circle of wealthier, more sophisticated New York City kids and spends the rest of her life defined, in one way or another, by that summer. The novel then tracks the group across more than forty years: Ethan becomes a spectacularly successful animator and the wealthiest of the group by an enormous margin; Jules becomes a therapist with a comfortable but modest life, quietly resentful of the gap between her expectations at nineteen and her reality at fifty; Ash marries Ethan and becomes a moderately successful theater director; Jonah, a folk-singer's son, walks away from music entirely after an act of exploitation during his teenage years; and Cathy and Goodman's arcs are shaped early by an assault allegation that permanently fractures the group. Wolitzer structures the book less around plot events than around the accumulation of ordinary disappointments and successes, tracking how talent identified at nineteen does or doesn't translate into a life, and how envy quietly reshapes even the closest friendships over decades.
The novel's real subject, more than summer camp nostalgia, is the specific psychological weight of being told you're special as a teenager and then having to live the rest of your adult life either living up to that label or reckoning with having fallen short of it. Wolitzer has said she was interested in the "slippery" nature of talent itself -- whether you're still talented if nothing ever comes of it, and whether recognition changes who you actually are as an artist.
Ethan's animated show, Figland, becomes a genuine cultural and financial phenomenon over the course of the novel, making him, on paper, the most conventionally successful of the six friends by an enormous margin. Wolitzer uses that runaway success less as a plot event than as a slow-acting pressure on everyone around him -- several of the others quietly wonder whether Ethan's work is actually the most interesting thing to come out of that 1974 summer, or simply the most lucrative, and the novel never fully settles the question either way. That gap between recognition and merit is one of the book's most consistent preoccupations, handled with more nuance than a simple "money isn't everything" moral would allow.
About Meg Wolitzer and Why She Wrote This
Wolitzer is the author of more than a dozen novels, including The Wife, The Female Persuasion, and The Ten-Year Nap, and is the daughter of novelist Hilma Wolitzer. She began publishing fiction while still an undergraduate at Smith College and has spent much of her career writing incisively about ambition, gender, and the gap between how women's talent and men's talent get recognized. In interviews, Wolitzer has traced The Interestings directly back to her own teenage summers: in 1974, she attended an arts-focused camp and met a group of city kids who fascinated her -- she'd grown up in the suburbs and hadn't really known anyone like them before. She's been careful to say the novel isn't simply a fictionalized account of that camp; rather, the experience was the first time in her life she felt she was taking herself seriously as an artist and encountering a wider world outside the one she grew up in, and that feeling of a door opening became the emotional center of the book. Notably, one friend she made that summer became a lifelong friend, and Wolitzer dedicated the novel to her -- a real detail that underlines how much the book is emotionally, if not factually, autobiographical. As the daughter of a working novelist, Wolitzer has also spoken about growing up with a specific, early-hand understanding of how uneven literary and creative success can be even among genuinely talented people, and that awareness of the gap between talent and reward informs the novel's clear-eyed, unsentimental treatment of Jules's disappointment as a therapist watching her camp friends' careers eclipse her own.
How It Compares to Franzen's Freedom and Eugenides's The Marriage Plot
The New York Times Book Review explicitly placed The Interestings in the company of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom and Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot, calling its scope and generosity comparable to those two widely discussed novels of the same era. All three books were published within roughly two years of each other and share a similar ambition: tracking a small group of characters across decades to say something larger about American ambition, class, and disappointment. Where The Interestings distinguishes itself is in its specific interest in talent and recognition as the organizing anxiety, rather than Freedom's environmental and marital politics or The Marriage Plot's campus intellectual romance. It's also, notably, more interested in female interiority than either of those books -- Jules's slow-burning envy of her wealthier, more successful friends is rendered with a specificity that neither Franzen's nor Eugenides's novel attempts for their female characters. Readers who came to The Interestings after admiring one of those two books tend to find a familiar structural comfort in the multi-decade ensemble format, while readers new to that particular subgenre of contemporary literary fiction -- the sprawling, socially observant, several-characters-over-several-decades novel -- should know it's a real and recognizable lineage, not a structure unique to Wolitzer.
What Critics Actually Said
Rather than inventing a verdict, here's what was actually published about it:
“Remarkable... With this book [Wolitzer] has surpassed herself.”— The New York Times Book Review
The same Times review praised the novel's "inclusive vision and generous sweep," placing it among the ranks of Freedom and The Marriage Plot. Not every review was uncomplicated praise, though -- Publishers Weekly's assessment landed more mixed, noting plainly that "the problem is that the Interestings are never quite as interesting as this 464-page look at them requires them to be," a real critical reservation about whether the character work justifies the novel's considerable length.
And the aggregate reader picture, for what it's worth:
Where Real Reviews Pushed Back
The most consistent complaint across independent reader reviews is length and pacing -- specifically, that the novel's middle section, covering the characters' twenties and thirties, treads water with lengthy expository passages and flashback episodes that some readers found slower than the strong opening at summer camp and the emotionally resonant final chapters. One recurring description from readers is that the book is "a little too meandering" and isn't a plot-driven read, which is a fair characterization rather than a dismissal -- Wolitzer is deliberately more interested in the slow accumulation of a life than in dramatic incident. Publishers Weekly's own reservation, that the ensemble isn't always as compelling as the page count demands, echoes what a real subset of readers report: genuine investment in the 1974 summer and the final chapters, with real patience required to get through the decades in between.
A related but distinct complaint concerns Jonah's storyline specifically. As the son of a famous folk singer, Jonah is drawn into a plot involving a mentor figure who exploits him as a teenager, a subplot some reviewers found the most narratively urgent thread in the book and others found underdeveloped relative to how much space Wolitzer gives Jules and Ethan. Because the novel is fundamentally an ensemble piece told mostly through Jules's perspective, characters like Jonah and Cathy inevitably receive less interior development than the two or three characters at the emotional center, and that imbalance is a real, specific version of the broader length complaint rather than a vague sense that the book is "too long."
On Talent, Envy, and What Gets Called "Interesting"
The novel's title is used half-ironically from the start -- the six friends nickname themselves "the Interestings" as teenagers, fully aware of how self-important it sounds, and the book spends the next four decades quietly interrogating whether any of them actually lived up to it. Ethan's wild commercial success as an animator becomes the yardstick the other characters, especially Jules, measure their own lives against, and Wolitzer is unsparing about how corrosive that comparison becomes even inside a genuinely loving marriage and friendship. The novel's real accomplishment is refusing to resolve the envy neatly -- Jules doesn't have an epiphany that cures her resentment of Ethan and Ash's wealth, she simply keeps living alongside it, which several critics have singled out as more emotionally honest than a tidier arc would have been.
On the Goodman Wolf Storyline and Its Long Shadow
An assault allegation against Goodman Wolf, made by Cathy Kiplinger early in the novel, permanently fractures the group and sends Goodman into a decades-long exile abroad, secretly supported by his sister Ash's money. Wolitzer handles this plotline with deliberate ambiguity about what actually happened, which some readers find a frustrating narrative choice and others find a realistic reflection of how families and friend groups actually process unresolved allegations -- protecting a beloved family member while never fully reckoning with the accusation itself. It's one of the novel's more morally uncomfortable threads, and it's handled with less resolution than most of the book's other storylines, which is either a strength or a weakness depending on how much narrative closure you need.
What's notable is how the allegation's aftershocks ripple outward rather than resolving into a single verdict. Ash spends decades quietly funding her brother's life in exile without ever fully confronting what he may or may not have done, and that unresolved loyalty becomes its own kind of character study -- what people are willing to not know about someone they love, and what it costs them to keep not knowing it. Cathy, meanwhile, largely disappears from the narrative after the accusation, which several readers and at least one critic have flagged as a structural imbalance: the person who made the allegation gets comparatively little narrative interiority afterward, while Goodman's absence looms much larger over the group's subsequent decades. Whether that's a deliberate commentary on whose stories get centered after an allegation, or simply an imbalance in the novel's design, is left for the reader to decide.
It's also worth noting that the novel largely avoids courtroom-drama or legal-thriller mechanics entirely -- there's no trial scene, no definitive piece of evidence revealed late in the book to settle the question for the reader. Wolitzer keeps the allegation in the register of family and friendship rather than the register of plot, which is consistent with the novel's overall approach: even its most dramatic single event is filtered through decades of quiet aftermath rather than a resolved, dramatized reckoning. Readers expecting a plot-driven payoff to that storyline specifically will likely find themselves, once again, running into the same pacing critique that shapes the rest of the book.
Key Takeaways
- The New York Times Book Review directly compared its scope to Jonathan Franzen's Freedom and Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot -- real, documented critical company
- Wolitzer has said the novel grew out of her own 1974 summer at an arts camp, though the plot and characters are invented rather than autobiographical
- Publishers Weekly's own review flagged a real reservation about whether the 464-page length is earned by the ensemble's interest level
- The 3.60 Goodreads average from more than 121,000 ratings reflects genuine reader division over pacing, not universal acclaim
- The Goodman Wolf storyline is deliberately left morally ambiguous, which some readers find realistic and others find frustratingly unresolved
Who This Book Is Actually For
Readers who want patient, character-driven literary fiction that tracks a friend group across decades -- particularly anyone drawn to stories about talent, envy, and the gap between who you were told you'd become at nineteen and who you actually are by fifty. It also rewards readers with an interest in the specific texture of late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century New York creative life -- the shifting geography of who could afford to live where, and how that geography quietly tracks each character's changing fortunes over the decades.
Who Should Read Something Else Instead
If you want a tightly plotted novel with forward momentum, the documented pacing criticism above is a legitimate reason to reconsider -- this is a slow, cumulative character study by design, and the middle decades in particular ask for real patience. Readers who bounced off similarly ambitious, multi-decade ensemble novels before should expect the same experience here rather than assuming this one will move differently.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Strong, widely praised New York Times Book Review notice comparing it to major contemporary literary fiction
- Genuinely sharp, specific writing about talent, envy, and recognition that avoids easy resolution
- A vivid, emotionally resonant opening at summer camp and a strong final stretch
- Real bestseller success and lasting reputation as a defining 2013 literary novel
- Unsparing, psychologically honest treatment of a decades-long friendship without a tidy moral
Cons:
- Publishers Weekly itself flagged that the ensemble isn't always as compelling as the length demands
- A meandering middle section that multiple independent readers describe as slow going
- The Goodman Wolf storyline is left deliberately ambiguous, which frustrates some readers looking for resolution
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the actual Goodreads rating for The Interestings?
3.60 out of 5 from more than 120,000 ratings as of this writing -- a solid but not exceptional number for literary fiction, reflecting genuine reader division over the novel's length and meandering structure.
Is The Interestings based on Meg Wolitzer's own life?
Loosely. Wolitzer attended an arts-focused summer camp as a teenager in 1974 and has said the experience of meeting a group of talented, fascinating peers there opened her eyes to a wider world, which became the emotional seed of the novel, though the specific plot and characters are invented.
Is the book really that long?
Yes -- it runs to roughly 468 pages and spans more than four decades, and Publishers Weekly noted directly that the characters aren't always as interesting as that length demands them to be. Multiple readers describe the middle section as meandering.
Do I need to have read Meg Wolitzer's other books first?
No. The Interestings is a standalone novel and doesn't connect to Wolitzer's other work, including The Female Persuasion or The Wife.
Sources & Further Reading
- Goodreads — The Interestings (aggregate rating, reader reviews)
- The New York Times Book Review
- Publishers Weekly
- NPR — "The Interestings: An Epic Post-Summer-Camp Coming-Of-Age," Meg Wolitzer interview
- PositiveLifes.com — free inspirational and life-changing PDF books
Final Verdict
The Interestings backs up its reputation with real critical company -- a New York Times comparison to Franzen and Eugenides, and lasting recognition as one of the defining literary novels of 2013. The length-and-pacing criticism from Publishers Weekly and independent readers alike is legitimate and worth knowing before you start, particularly if you need forward plot momentum to stay engaged. But the patience it demands mirrors exactly what its characters spend forty years learning about talent, envy, and disappointment, and for most readers who stick with it, that turns out to be the point. It's a novel best approached the way its own characters eventually learn to approach their own lives: without expecting a dramatic resolution, and with the understanding that the accumulation itself is where the meaning lives.
Buy Day rating: 8.0/10