New American fiction: Come what may The Interestings. By Meg Wolitzer. Riverhead; 480 pages; $27.95. Chatto & Windus; £16.99. ON A warm July evening in 1974, six American teenagers practise being ironic. Weeks before Richard Nixon leaves the White House, they hang out in a summer-camp tepee, smoke pot, drink vodka and juice and talk of Günter Grass. They riff on their dreams and ambitions, which seem so full of possibility that they dub their sextet, "The Interestings." And so on it goes for more than 100 pages until one of the boys, Goodman Wolf, is accused of raping a girl in the group. Adding to the intrigue, Goodman skips bail and disappears before his trial. The "legal, moral migraine" of Goodman Wolf, and the mystery of his whereabouts, challenge the friendships of the four at the group's core - Jules, Jonah, Ethan and Goodman's sister, Ash. Their ties are also tested by struggle and success, jealousy and unrequited love. As the 1970s morph into the Reagan years and the first threat of AIDS with "its certain death sentence," they find their dreams faltering in unexpected ways. Jules, an aspiring comic actress, becomes a therapist for whom other unsatisfied, lonely New Yorkers act out their hopes and despairs. Jonah, abused as a boy by an older musician, puts away his guitar and takes up engineering. Ethan and Ash marry. He turns a boyhood talent as an animator into his life's work and becomes a billionaire; she is the model mother and wife. Their smug comfort is a source of terrible envy among the rest. As teenagers the world was their oyster, but for this generation, living in the shadow of the baby-boomers, life does not always live up to expectations. Having written eight previous novels, Meg Wolitzer is good at turning a plot. She knows how to shape characters and use telling details to move the storyline. More than anything, she is good at bringing together all the loose ends into a satisfying finish. But there is no getting away from the novel's central problem. Born when the strongest country in the world was at its most powerful, these teenagers are healthy, wealthy and highly educated. They could do anything. But their collective obsession with the summer of 1974 - those hopeful, memorable months at camp - is a little too forced to be believable. In the end, as one character says, "they're not that interesting."