The interesting ones

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The Interesting (English original title: The Interestings ) is a novel by the American writer Meg Wolitzer from 2013. It is about a group of young people who get to know each other in a holiday camp and consider themselves to be particularly interesting people, and follows them on their later life . The German translation by Werner Loch-Lawrence was published by DuMont Verlag in 2014 .

content

After her father died of pancreatic cancer , 15-year-old Julie Jacobson from the New York suburb of Underhill spent the summer of 1974 at the Spirit-in-the-Woods holiday camp in Belknap, Massachusetts . The artistically oriented summer camp is a welcome way to escape your provincial home. Here she meets five other young people between the ages of 15 and 16 who give their group the name Die Interestanten because they consider themselves extraordinary people : the unspoken leader of the group Goodman Wolf, his equally beautiful and talented sister Ash, the womanly dancer Cathy Kiplinger, the ingenious cartoonist Ethan Figman and Jonah Bay, the son of a well-known folk singer . The inconspicuous Julie can hardly believe that she belongs to such a group, but she, who will soon only be called "Jules" by everyone, is valued by the others for her funny comments.

Jules is particularly drawn to the male Goodman Wolf, but he only has eyes for Cathy. Instead, the unsightly Ethan tries tentative advances, which Jules rejects because, although she values ​​his friendship, she feels physically repelled by him. Another couple emerges between Ash and Jonah, although the signs are growing that Jonah is actually gay. Even after returning from camp, the six “interesting people” meet regularly in New York. After another summer camp, at which Cathy enters into a relationship with the black dancer Troy, a decisive event occurs on New Year's morning in 1976: Cathy Kiplinger accuses Goodman Wolf of having raped her that night. The group automatically shows solidarity with Goodman, who no one wants to trust anyone to do such a thing, and excludes the victim. But Cathy upholds her allegations, and Goodman goes into hiding before the trial. At the 1976 summer camp, there are only four interesting ones left. Surprisingly, the beautiful Ash and the ugly Ethan get closer, who is the only one in the group who can empathize with their worries about her brother and still maintains contact with Cathy.

Years later, it is above all Ethan who can fulfill his youthful artistic ambitions. As the creator of the globally successful cartoon series Figworld , he was soon to be considered one of the most influential personalities in the media world. His wife Ash becomes a respected director of feminist plays, but she always remains in his shadow. Jonah Bay has given up music completely because he cannot get over a traumatic childhood experience in which he was drugged by a friend of his mother's to exploit his musical creativity. After an interlude with the Moon sect , which his mother appropriates, he works as an engineer in robotics and has an openly gay relationship with HIV- positive Robert Takahashi, which he likes so much precisely because you have to be careful. The friends only hear from Cathy Kiplinger, whose female body stood in the way of a dance career, after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 . As managing director of an affected company, she is criticized in the media for delays in providing an aid fund.

After Jules' half-hearted attempts as an actress failed, she worked as a psychotherapist and married the ultrasound technician Dennis Boyd, who suffers from severe depression . Involuntarily, she constantly compares him to Ethan, although she considers him physically more attractive than the adolescent suitor in the summer camp, but cannot rid herself of the envy that life at the side of the celebrated and wealthy Ethan is more her due than her friend Ash. Because Ethan still has few hidden feelings for her. Jules also knows of a secret that Ash has from her husband: as early as 1977 she met her brother Goodman in Iceland , where he led an incognito life, but she promised her parents that she would keep this from the morally incorruptible Ethan, so as not to endanger her brother.

In 2010 Jules dared to start a new career, gave up her practice and took over the management of Spirit-in-the-Woods together with her husband . But she is disappointed that as an adult she is no longer part of the youth community, but is left out, and gives up work at the end of the summer to have to start all over as a therapist. Goodman, who had returned from Iceland, surprisingly turned up at the camp this summer. When Jules reports this to Ash, Ethan overhears the phone's speakerphone. He cannot get over his wife's betrayal and separates from her temporarily, until the couple finally get back together after a few months and a failed affair with Jules. Ethan has been diagnosed with skin cancer that has progressed to the point of incurable. He dies in a clinic in Switzerland. He leaves Jules a package with old drawings by two teenagers, which obviously represent both of them. The boy is at the same time saddened by the girl's rejection and yet happy that he loves her. Jules has since learned that one can also let go of the obsession with being interesting. But after all that she still finds life interesting, comparing it to an endless loop of cartoons .

background

The Interestings is Meg Wolitzer's ninth novel and, according to the Guardian, more ambitious than any of her previous works. In March 2012, in the essay The Second Shelf in the New York Times , Wolitzer denounced the sexist literature scene in the United States, in which women authors are only assigned the second, lower shelf, while the important new publications by male authors are presented on the upper shelf. For Wolitzer, the essay was also to become the program for her own work: For the first time, she wrote a novel in "brick format", which by its size should signal importance and contain everything that defines the Great American Novel , the great American social novel : “It's the book I really wanted to write [...] and I took a deep breath and did it. [...] I tried to lift bigger weights. "

The starting point of the action, the summer camp, in which the interested people meet, arose from Wolitzer's own experience in a " hippie-like " camp in the early 1970s. In an interview, Wolitzer described how she began to discover her talent and develop daydreams of a possible future: "I went to a summer camp and immediately became pretentious." The life of the young people in the camp, who mostly came from New York, seemed " So much richer, so much fuller than mine They knew a lot of things that I didn't know. They were intellectual, elegant, cultured, interesting, to use the word from the novel. Really. "With The Interestings , Wolitzer didn't want to write a novel about a summer camp, but rather" what it is like for a young person when he finds his tribe. "

The figures are also fed from pieces from Wolitzer's own biography, which Wolitzer commented with the words: "You inflate a figure's balloon with your own breath". Julie, for example, shares her suburban origins, while Ethan Figman has her success as a writer, although his career is also modeled on the Simpsons inventor Matt Groening . Jonah Bay's famous mother, who overshadows her son's talent, has a parallel with Wolitzer's own mother, who was also a writer. The similarity of his name to the folk singer Joan Baez , however, is unintentional: “I didn't want that association. But the subconscious sometimes goes strange ways. "Wolitzer summarized her ambitions with the novel:" I wanted to create characters that are bigger than life. I wanted them to burn into the minds of readers. This time I really wanted that. "

reception

The Interestings received much critical acclaim in the United States and was considered a breakthrough for both Meg Wolitzer's popularity and her reputation as a serious writer. After a 30-year literary career, the novel brought Wolitzer an "overnight success". The novel also meant a breakthrough for her in German-speaking countries. It was ranked 32nd in the hardcover edition in the Spiegel bestseller list and again ranked 40th in the paperback edition a year later.

According to Patricia Wolf, growing up, friendship and betrayal are the big themes of the story, which Wolitzer tells with “a lot of warmth and empathy”, “entertaining and touching”, but without any pathos . In the background, however, are 40 years of American history, which is why the novel has something of a Great American Novel for her. Ursula März reads a “Zeitroman” with “masterful psychological individual portraits” and “a sharp analysis of the zeitgeist of the late 20th century”, which reminds her of Jonathan Franzen . For Thomas Hummitzsch, Die Interestanten is above all a “feminist novel [...] that reflects the self-empowerment of American women”. “Precision, psychological depth and narrative pleasure” made the “social and generational novel an event”. According to Kaspar Heinrich, Wolitzer's “truly epic novel” raises “huge questions”, which the characters answer differently.

For Bernadette Conrad, the strength of the novel lies “in the fact that it identifies the indissoluble contradictions of its protagonists [...] as the very complexity that makes them human.” In doing so, he creates believable characters whose “identities are complex and complex, contradicting and inevitable pain-laden ”. Felicitas von Lovenberg , however, criticizes the lack of maturity of the characters, "who even in their mid-fifties still strongly resemble teenagers". She misses a “justification [...] for the immense grief” with which “wishes for life are buried” in the novel. The problem with those interested is that this is exactly what they are not. For Meike Feßmann, on the other hand, the novel rightly bears its title: With its "kaleidoscopic design", Wolitzer manages to arouse sympathy for each of her characters. The novel has "charm, intelligence and character".

filming

Amazon Studios produced a pilot film in 2016 for a planned film adaptation of the novel as a series entitled The Interestings . Directed by Mike Newell . Performers included Lauren Ambrose , Matt Barr , Jessica Collins , Corey Cott , Gabriel Ebert , David Krumholtz and Jessica Paré . The pilot received mixed reviews. Margaret Lyons found in the New York Times that a film adaptation always loses the accuracy of the characters' inner workings. However, the pilot conveyed well "the different textures of the relationships between the old friends, who are sometimes strained and sometimes the only source of peace in their lives." Jeff Jensen in Entertainment Weekly, however, judged that the pilot was completely chaotic. Newell and his authors are not able to "take a clear stance on Wolitzer's story and translate the author's benevolent, empathetic understanding of her characters into dramatic or visual language." Studio boss Roy Price announced in August 2016 that the series would no longer be produced will.

expenditure

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Emma Brockes : Meg Wolitzer: "The character is not standing for women everywhere. I had to write that on my forehead " . In: The Guardian, August 10, 2013.
  2. ↑ Meg Wolitzer: The Second Shelf. On the Rules of Literary Fiction for Men and Women . In: The New York Times of March 30, 2012.
  3. ↑ a b Wieland Freund : “In a fairer world you would know me” . In: Die Welt from September 3, 2014.
  4. ↑ "I went off to a summer camp and became immediately pretentious" Quoted from: Emma Brockes : Meg Wolitzer: "The character is not standing for women everywhere. I had to write that on my forehead " . In: The Guardian, August 10, 2013.
  5. ↑ a b Simone Hamm: Greed becomes socially acceptable . In: Deutschlandfunk from September 30, 2014.
  6. ^ Sarah Lyall: Why Now May (Finally) Be Meg Wolitzer's Moment . In: The New York Times, March 23, 2018.
  7. ↑ Madeleine Hofmann: “Sex and family, that is a source of weirdness” . In: Der Spiegel from September 23, 2015.
  8. ↑ Die Interestanten, hardcover at Buchreport .
  9. ↑ Die Interestanten, paperback at Buchreport .
  10. ↑ Patricia Wolf: Just be there . In: Der Tagesspiegel from January 4, 2015.
  11. ↑ Thomas Hummitzsch: Meg Wolitzer: The Interesting . In: Rolling Stone of September 11, 2014.
  12. ↑ Kaspar Heinrich: The taming of the possessed . In: Der Spiegel from August 20, 2014.
  13. ↑ Bernadette Conrad: Fascinating group portrait . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung from May 26, 2015.
  14. ↑ Felicitas von Lovenberg : Everything a question of faith . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of October 17, 2014.
  15. ↑ Meike Feßmann : In the eternal summer camp . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of September 12, 2014.
  16. ↑ The Interestings in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  17. ↑ "effectively conveys the various textures of the relationships among the old friends, which are sometimes fraught and sometimes the only source of peace in their lives." Quoted from: Margaret Lyons, Mike Hale and Neil Genzlinger: Amazon's Literary Forays for TV: " The Interestings "and" The Last Tycoon " . In: The New York Times, June 17, 2016.
  18. ↑ "fail to find a distinct point of view on Wolitzer's story or translate the author's gracious, insightful understanding of her characters into dramatic or visual language." Quoted from: Jeff Jensen: Amazon's The Interestings and The Last Tycoon: EW Reviews . In: Entertainment Weekly of June 17, 2016.
  19. ↑ Cynthia Littleton: Amazon Still Facing Hurdles as Prime Video Volume Grows . In: Variety of August 7, 2016.