Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings is a big book. At 468 pages, the book is about a group of friends and spans over a period of a few decades, making it a generational book. It is thus inevitable that it will a) be called ambitious (ambitious because you’re asking a reader in today’s short attention span to keep ploughing through) and b) have comparisons made to Jonathan Franzen, whose Corrections and Freedom also fall into big book, spanning a few decades and covers relationships category. However, unlike Franzen, whose novels were received with such critical acclaim that it was almost impossible to find someone who wasn’t gushing over Freedom in 2010, Wolitzer’s The Interestings … errr … did not. Though those who have read it have largely loved it, which makes for the very compelling case that women writers don’t get the coverage that their male counterparts do.

This discrimination is frankly obvious and one that Wolitzer herself wrote about in an essay in The New York Times last year, pre-The Interestings. In it she talked about women’s fiction: “I’m not applying the term the way it’s sometimes used: to describe a certain type of fast-reading novel, which sets its sights almost exclusively on women readers and might well find a big, ready-made audience. I’m referring to literature that happens to be written by women. But some people, especially some men, see most fiction by women as one soft, undifferentiated mass that has little to do with them.” She also spoke of how publishers, their marketing departments and even readers treat women’s fiction. So if a man writes about things like a family or relationships over decades, it is literature, but when women do the same it is “women’s fiction.” This is tragic.

Was Wolitzer prophetic about The Interestings, which would be published a year after her essay and did not receive the reception it — and here’s where things can go awry — should have? I say awry because it depends on where you stand on the loved it/hated it line and also because it didn’t make it to the league of Franzen.

The Interestings’ main appeal is that its themes are so easily relatable to anyone who has belonged to a circle of friends, dreamed the big dream of success, wealth and fame and then, as the years go by, come to realise that life is about disappointment, unfulfilled promises, even envying those you love.

The Interestings are a group of six friends who meet at a summer camp for the artistically inclined in New York in the 1970s. They name themselves thus because they believe it to be true: they are gifted, smart and talented, everything that makes them dangerously close to being called ‘The Unbearables’ by others. The novel is narrated in the third person and features Julie Jacobson, who is renamed Jules once she joins the group, a young woman committed to the arts but who will never be able to make it in that field. Ethan Figman shows most signs of talent right then as a gifted animator who will pine for Jules all his life but marry another member of the group, the rich and beautiful Ash Wolf. Ash’s brother Goodman is also part of the Interestings as is Cathy, who has a talent for dance, and Jonah, who is the son of a famed folk singer with a style for song and music himself.

The novel traces these characters’ lives in a non-linear format, so there are moments where one feels like they got the punch line of the joke way ahead of its time, but it is not cause for upsets akin to TV show spoilers. We will read about some dreams that get crushed early and some that never materialise because they don’t have the talent or because they were unjustly told they didn’t and they believed it to be true. We will read about their marriages, their roles as parents and their secrets, be it failings or about an event that caused division among the ranks, so to speak. And, what happens when some friends reach success while others don’t. We will read about envy of a life that could have been different had X made money and become famous instead of Y.

We will also read about failure after much success — as happens to Ethan, who is a celebrated TV writer whose spin-off TV shows fare miserably as he struggles to recreate the magic. His wife Ash, a playwright who gets good reviews, and who is also the butt of envy of her best friend Jules, is a loyal friend, wife and mother. And this poses many moral dilemmas for her because she is caught in a conundrum after Cathy accuses her brother Goodman of rape at the beginning of the book and he flees to Iceland in fear that he will be incarcerated. It is a dilemma because her loyalty to Goodman goes against her feminist principles, and yet she never tells anyone about Goodman’s escape, except Jules, who is also put in an awkward situation when she is asked by Ash to persuade Cathy from withdrawing the charges.

Jules carries Goodman’s secret and keeps it from her husband, Dennis, a sonogram technician who suffers bouts of depression but with whom she has a seemingly good marriage, despite the envy she feels towards Ethan and Ash, which even prompts her to uproot her family and return to the camp, this time to run it. In the process she learns some uncomfortable truths. These realities, about loyalties, even in difficult circumstances, are another reminder of the difficulties that life can spring on you and Wolitzer frames this very well.

We never know what actually transpired between Goodman and Cathy (there are no details of the incident) but it is safe to assume that he is guilty of the alleged crime, based on the fact that he flees to Scandinavia, where he leads a very uninteresting life. Another reminder of the consequence of a choice one makes — and not just Goodman but those who side with/against him — and what happens when secrets are discovered.

Does all this make for depressing reading? Only if you believe that life is meant to only go upwards, that there are no periods of slumps and lows. This novel will speak to those who have not led the lives they imagined they would when they were 17. Though at times the pace may be slow, and the references to historical events seem like unnecessary fillers, The Interestings is a lovely tribute to the realities — and expectations — of friendship.

The Interestings (NOVEL) By Meg Wolitzer Riverhead Books, USA ISBN 978-1-59448-839-9 468pp.