The Interestings

"It’s hard to write well about modern friendship — as hard, perhaps, as it is to nurture one. Meg Wolitzer’s latest — and probably finest — follows a group of friends who meet at arts camp in upstate New York, and go on to a mixture of great successes and minor failures. The characters remain friends for the rest of their lives, and the nature of those friendships and how they ebb and flow within those successes and failures are the novel’s most striking achievement. What does it mean to covet a beloved friend’s accomplishment, and to really envy his success? Wolitzer writes convincingly about teenagers, and who they become as grown-ups. And she really captures that magical period where all teenagers thought they would grow up to be as special as they were the night of the school play — only to find that life is less exciting, and more interesting (ha!) than they even thought."

"I have a sweet tooth for novels that are about a group of friends... books like Meg Wolitzer's "The Interestings" or Jeffrey Eugenides's "The Marriage Plot.""