The most interesting thing about The Interestings is how addicted the author is to every single trite and boring cliche known to humanity. The fascination of the book, to me, resided in trying to guess if there was going to be an authorial wink, signaling that Wolitzer knew that these cliches were stupid and possibly even offensive to some people. I missed any indication that she was aware of what she was doing.
Here are some of the cliches that organize the novel’s plot:
1. Jews are brilliant at making money. They make tons of it. And they help each other in secret ways to make money.
2. Nobody but Jews can make money.
3. Even half-Jews are incapable of making money. But they can always try to attach themselves to money-making Jews and leech off them.
4. Jews can’t have good marriages because they are too fucked up by their parents.
5. It’s a woman’s lot to bear in cheerful silence any ridiculous antic that her husband might throw and any form of torture he might subject her to for decades. But it’s not a husband’s role to do anything like this for his wife.
6. Few things in life are worse than having an autistic child because those autistics are just useless and icky.
7. Dancers of any age, gender or race are extremely sexual in a way that non-dancers can’t hope to be.
8. Hippies are horrible parents and immoral drug addicts.
9. Everybody wants to be an artist. But you are only a real artist when you make tons of money. But you won’t manage to make tons of money because. . . see cliches 1 and 2.
I also have positive things to say about the book but they will have to wait until the next post.
Clarissa's Blog 
Are you actually going to finish this book? Sounds like it belongs on the yuck pile.
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I finished it. An intelligent person can derive value from anything. 🙂
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I guess I’m not that intelligent. I stalled after about 30 pages of the Autobiography of Malcom X (which brings the meaning of words like ‘banal’ and ‘trite’ into vivid focus). I keept thinking I should get back to it, but…..
It might be better if I could be convinced that there was going to be real writing at some point, but I’m reminded of Truman Capote’s quip about another book “that’s not writing, that’s typing” (A had the same feeling a year or so ago when I read something by Aleksandra Marinina but I wasn’t sure if it was the book or the translator’s fault).
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Do you remember the title of the Marinina book that you read? She obviously doesn’t create art but she makes very good entertainment. I’m reading her new novel right now! The recent ones haven’t been amazing but the ones from the 90s are great.
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“Do you remember the title of the Marinina book that you read?”
The first, the title was translated as ‘supper with a killer’ (kolacja z zabojcą) in Polish though the Russian original was something about coincidences.
It had its moments and at times I really liked the protagonist but there was a lot of stuff that just dragged (maybe it meant something for Russian readers so the plain style worked better?). Also as I recall it was more a crime story than a mystery novel (no big revelations that I recall).
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