![]() ![]() That’s the question that comes to preoccupy Jules Jacobson, the ambitious protagonist of Meg Wolitzer’s remarkable ninth novel, “The Interestings,” whose inclusive vision and generous sweep place it among the ranks of books like Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom” and Jeffrey Eugenides’s “Marriage Plot.” “The Interestings” is warm, all-American and acutely perceptive about the feelings and motivations of its characters, male and female, young and old, gay and straight but it’s also stealthily, unassumingly and undeniably a novel of ideas. But does the compulsion to excel make anybody happy? Or is it, rather, a prescription for disappointment in oneself and in the “circumscribed world”? And yet his quest to be exceptional (in which he inarguably succeeded) didn’t appear to make him all that happy, judging from his prodigious, grumbling output. ![]() Mencken once wrote that his definition of happiness included “a comfortable feeling of superiority to the masses of one’s fellow men” - something he suggested was more easily achieved in this country than elsewhere. ![]()
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