Friendship 
 This is a rather good book with a rather bad title. You get six bright teenagers--an artist, a dancer, a musician, two actors, and a writer--at a summer camp for the arts who gather together in a teepee one night and swear to be friends for ever, and they can't call themselves anything more significant than "The Interestings"? Fortunately, the name itself is hardly used again in this substantial book (until the very end), but the friendships do indeed endure, over four tumultuous decades from the seventies to the present. Friendships between three of them in particular: awkward yet funny Julie Jacobson, whom her new friends immediately rename Jules; homely, nerdy Ethan Figman, who is a genius at making animated cartoons; and beautiful and privileged Ash Wolf, who hopes to become an actress. 
 Jules is the clear protagonist, but the close links between the three hold firm even as time intervenes, with the inevitable changes in their financial fortunes, marriages, parenthood, unexpected successes, personal disasters, and the many vicissitudes of American life over the past quarter-century. Wolitzer is marvelously skilled at balancing the public with the personal, visiting such things as Watergate, the AIDS epidemic, two recessions, and the World Trade Center attack without ever dragging them in as set pieces. They are simply there as background to the lives of these people, and the many others who become connected to them. Similarly, although the friends all met in arts camp, and their work in their various professions is treated realistically even when it doesn't work out, this is not primarily a book about talent and the factors that can reward or destroy it. Rather, it is a novel about the way people anywhere get on with their lives, handling disappointment or managing success. As a conservatory teacher who has seen so many young people go out to redefine success in their own ways, this point of view strikes me as totally authentic. But what really kept me reading the novel was its strong moral sense and the value it places on friendship. 
 The subject as such is hardly original: it has been around at least as long as Mary McCarthy's 
 The Group 
 ; Lynn Sharon Schwartz handled it rather beautifully in 
 Disturbances in the Field 
 ; and Jeffrey Eugenides, who writes enthusiastic praise on the book jacket, should know from doing something similar though on a smaller scale in The Marriage Plot. What distinguishes Meg Wolitzer is (a) her warmth, sensitivity to feelings, and knowledge of what makes a marriage work, (b) her technical skill at telling a chronological story while nonetheless jumping around in time, and (c) her ability to carry such a long book through a forty-year span without any sense of let-down. I drafted most of this review before reading the last 50 pages, but now that I have, I can only report that they are a marvel, managing at the same time to close the circle on old characters and themes while being more full of surprises than almost anywhere else in the novel. In the last chapter, Jules thinks back to her first summer at Spirit-in-the-Woods camp, lying on the lawn in awkward intimacy with other kids to form the letters of a message to be photographed from the air for a holiday card. Let me quote the last sentence of this wonderful book, which gives away nothing of the story but so perfectly encapsulates the spirit of the whole, though perhaps underplaying its enduring love: 
 And didn't it always go like that--body parts not quite lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn't stop watching because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.