Painting a great panorama

The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer (Chatto, £16.99)

Teenagers make good subjects for novelists because they come with a hefty range of adult anxieties but few skills with which to dignify or disguise them. At Spirit In the Woods, the summer camp in Meg Wolitzer’s ninth novel, love, betrayal and existential angst are on rich display, and in keeping with the mayfly cycles of teenage life, they’re all to be seen every day — before lunch.

The story begins in the summer of 1974, when “Nixon was still over a month away from being lifted off the White House lawn like a rotten piece of outdoor furniture”, and six self-important kids passing joints in Boys’ Teepee 3 decide to name themselves The Interestings and to stay friends for ever.

Wolitzer’s comic gifts find an ideal expression in these early scenes. At times she has Anne Tyler’s eye for tender detail — the perm intended to salvage Julie’s hair turns out “dandeliony”; an unpopular kid “plays cello as if… at the funeral of a child”. And she brings the camp to life in a flurry of quirky particulars — the creaking bunk beds, the drama club emanating weird moos and baas, the pet llamas, and the owners, Manny and Edie Wunderlich, overseeing this, “like God and God’s wife”.

But for all the line-by-line joys, Wolitzer preps her reader for a satirical follow-through she never supplies. Though her story begins on a needlepoint in history, she doesn’t link her teenagers’ self-importance with the culture in which they were raised. It’s a frustrating approach — and it’s one she maintains throughout the decades-long saga of their lives.

At a later stage she notes the emergence of Aids, at another that dinner party talk is all about “the world wide web”, but except for a few undercooked details — Ash and Jules buy vibrators in the Eighties, for example — she gives little sense of how social change affects their inner lives.

Wolitzer never quite settles on an overall tone, either. Once the teenagers drift into adulthood she follows four of them — Jules, Ash, Ethan and Jonah — into late middle age. Though she plainly wants her story to have a sweeping, 19th-century scope, Wolitzer has a 20th-century sensibility, a reverence for subjectivity, and a tendency to view psychology as fate. But as if these emphases were not grand enough for her purpose, she repeatedly hauls the focus away from the specific and personal which she captures so well.

Sometimes, in their place, comes a wobbly panorama: “Susannah Bay and her husband… headed back up to the farm where they would live together for the rest of their earthly lives.” At other points Wolitzer gives such quantities of narrative information — pregnancies, births, house moves — that it’s impossible to absorb them. It’s a bit like watching the characters’ lives unfold via time-lapse photography.

It’s when Wolitzer permits her own insights that her talent comes back to life. As Jules and her husband wash up in their rundown apartment, Dennis hands her a dish and she “grabbed a dish towel which felt slightly grimy, almost oily. If she dried the plate with this they would find themselves trapped in not-quite-cleanliness. Suddenly she wanted to cry”.

It’s a wonderfully compressed piece of emotional reasoning.

For a novelist whose gifts are for economy and close observation, a wide-ranging third-person structure is an odd artistic choice. The Interestings is almost 500 pages long — it would be fascinating to see how much more Wolitzer could do in 200.