For his new friends, Ethan's authenticity is regenerative: it gives them something to recognise, something around which to organise themselves, and it is in this constellation that they remain as the years progress. This power is already in evidence in the group's teenaged sojourn at Spirit in the Woods, a place founded on the values of the 1960s and now filled with children exhausted by their erstwhile-hippy parents' successes.

Where the other members of the group possess beauty, privilege or intellect in varying degrees, Ethan has the kind of talent most cherished in the American story: the kind that transforms negative into positive, that turns suffering into power. Ethan is already drawing comic strips in spiral-bound notebooks that transmute the suburban familial bleakness of his own childhood into a world of mordant humour. Among the teenagers who gather one summer at a camp outside New York called 'Spirit in the Woods' is Ethan Figman, 'thick bodied, unusually ugly, his features appearing a little bit flattened, as if pressed against a mime's invisible glass wall'. Wolitzer is a writer of prodigious energy and detail, with the knack for comic-satirical perceptions of character and culture that powers other long-running American narratives and perhaps finds its best expression in the numberless TV series that have become an imported staple of our own culture too, whose black wit is forever counterpoised against their ebullience and inexhaustibility.Īnd indeed, the creation of one such series – a Simpsons-like animation called Figland – is the centrepiece of Wolitzer's story of the group's trajectory into adulthood. This is the kind of American novel that sees the world through a wide-angle lens, and try as it might to incorporate tragedy, it is essentially a cheerful enterprise with a guaranteed entertainment value. Its narrative principles might perhaps be described as old-fashioned in that their aim is to tell the story – in a manner that confers a beneficent kind of coherence on the business of living – of several people over a considerable number of years people who, moreover, are bound voluntarily by friendship rather than forcibly by blood. The Interestings is the US novelist Meg Wolitzer's 10th book, a long novel concerning the unfolding fates of a group of friends from teenagehood to middle age.

The interestings meg