The Emperor's Children

We've all caught glimpses of them before, but Claire Messud has captured and pinned under glass members of a striking subspecies of the modern age: the smart, sophisticated, anxious young people who think of themselves as the cultural elite. Trained for greatness in the most prestigious universities, these shiny liberal arts graduates emerge with expensive tastes, the presumption of entitlement and no real economic prospects whatsoever. If you're one of them or if you can't resist the delicious pleasure of pitying them, you'll relish every page of The Emperor's Children .

The three wunderkinds at the center of Messud's engrossing satire are friends from Brown, strutting through life with élan but also with a sense of floundering that chafes at them like a new pair of Christian Louboutin shoes. Julius Clarke, a freelance critic for the Village Voice, is "aware that at thirty he stretched the limits of the charming wastrel, that some actual sustained endeavor might be in order were he not to fade, wisplike, away." Danielle Minkoff works as a producer of documentary films, but she's not having any luck selling her ideas (the Australian revolution? liposuction malpractice?). Marina Thwaite, the gorgeous daughter of a celebrity journalist, is one of the "it" girls of New York, but she's never actually done anything. A job, she tells her father, would "make me ordinary, like everybody else." For several years, she's maintained the illusion of purpose by procrastinating on a vacuous work of cultural criticism about the history of children's clothing. Having spent her advance and outlasted three editors, she's fallen into paralysis.

Yes, they're spoiled, they're self-absorbed, and they're whiny, but above all else they're irresistibly clever and endowed with the kind of hyper-analytical minds that make them fascinating critics of each other and themselves.

We join this flawlessly drawn triangle just before the arrival of Marina's flabby cousin, Bootie, from Watertown, N.Y., light years away from the glamour of Manhattan. Antisocial and self-righteous, Bootie has dropped out of college ("full of jabbering fools") to pursue his own program of reading and radical self-reliance. Having long admired Marina's famous father from afar, he drives to New York City to see him, clutching a copy of Emerson's essays. Messud has perfected a narrative voice that simultaneously reveals her characters' thoughts and mocks them. "Like Una in The Faerie Queene ," she writes, "Bootie, too, needed to discern the route to wisdom. He was, he decided, like a pilgrim in the old days, a pilgrim in search of knowledge."

Marina's father, Murray Thwaite, the regal figure around which all these characters orbit, is Messud's masterpiece. A journalist who's been skating on his reputation for decades, Murray is the quintessential public intellectual, the moral conscience of the age (a pompous old windbag and a serial adulterer). "Integrity is everything, it's all you've got" he tells a young journalism student he hopes to sleep with. "If you have a voice, a gift, you're morally bound to exploit it." He's burnt to such a crisp under Messud's laser wit that real-life windbags all over New York may want to keep their heads down till the smoke clears. Murray is only too eager to welcome Bootie into his home: "My amanuensis," he announces, "like Pound and Yeats." But Bootie, the pompous rube, is too naive, too childish to see his hero up close without suffering the kind of disillusionment that inspires vengeance.

Beneath the rich surface of this comedy of manners runs Messud's attention to "authenticity": its importance, its elusiveness and the myriad tricks of self-delusion we pursue to imagine we possess it in greater degree than our friends and family. Marina and her gang think they'll shake the world awake and then conquer it with their disruptive candor, but, smart as they are, they're too trapped in the bubble of their own vanity. Messud is that bold spectator in the crowd willing to shout out that the emperor has no clothes -- and neither do his children.

A number of gifted young people in New York will luxuriate in the masochistic pleasure of reading this novel. (Their indulgent parents -- skewered here, too -- may find it somewhat less enjoyable.) Messud's real audience, though, is broader, in the same way that Edith Wharton focused on a particularly rarefied class but spoke to any reader who could relish her piercing cultural commentary. For us, Messud's novel, so arch and elegantly phrased, is a chance to enter a world in which everything glistens with her wit, like waking to an early frost: refreshing, enchanting and deadly.

The disaster that concludes the novel isn't particularly surprising -- we're in New York City, 2001, after all -- and neither is the fact that these characters, except for Bootie, emerge from the terrorist assaults essentially unaffected. That may be Messud's most damning comment on these entitled young people. They're inert, suspended between great expectations and a desperate fear of failure. As the joys of adolescence grow more impossible to retain, adulthood presses on them like something terminal.

Late in the book Danielle wonders if growing up is "a process of growing away from mirth, as if, like an amphibian, one ceased to breathe in the same way: laughter, once vital sustenance, protean relief and all that made isolation and struggle and fear bearable was replaced by the stolid matter of stability. . . . Where there had been laughter, there came a cold breeze."

The most remarkable quality of Messud's writing may be its uncanny blend of maturity and mirth. Somehow, she can stand in that chilly wind blowing on us all and laugh.

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Ok, I am giving this book 2 1/2 stars.
Ugh! This book was picked for my ladies book club and I really wanted to like it but ended up not caring for it at all.
The story about 3 to 4 thirty something people who had no idea what they wanted in life. They had the opportunity to do something in life but seemed to be in angst as to what to do to fulfill this endeavor.
The author wrote with such high brow words and way too many adjectives to describe the characters and their situations. Didn't care for it. She reminded me of Jonathan Frazen who I have tried to like also but just don't. Their stories are full of characters I just don't care for.
The only redeemable part of this story was at the end of the story when one character decided to leave everyone and start his life on his own. Not staying in touch with any of them. Given the way these other people were, I didn't blame him.
Of course this is my opinion and wouldn't tell anyone NOT to read this book. Everyone has their own likes and dislikes.

James Wood explains that the "novel exists to be affecting...to shake us profoundly. When we're rigorous about feeling, we're honoring that." The reader, then, should approach the text as a writer, "which is [about] making aesthetic judgments."

Claire Messud, the author of “The Emperor’s Children” is married to James Wood, noted critic published in “The Guardian”. His precise judgment of the purpose of the novel seemed like an interesting place to begin a review of Claire Messud’s fourth novel, which has gained universal critical appreciation, even admiration. I don’t believe that reading “The Emperor’s Children shook me “profoundly”, but more than once I found myself pausing to savor something like profound insights. What becomes apparent with the opening chapter is that Messud writes with a command of her art that is an important aesthetic achievement. I was not only drawn into the story of Murray Thwaite, the “emperor” of the title, and his “children”, but found myself relishing a rare quality of tone and tempo created by the author’s words.

Meghan O’ Rourke, reviewing the book for the New York Times writes, “The Emperor’s Children” is a masterly comedy of manners — an astute and poignant evocation of hobnobbing glitterati in the months before and immediately following Sept. 11.” She is reminded of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Henry James by Messud’s “uncanny” ability to limn her character’s to epitomize a slice of current, upscale American life.

There is no doubt in my mind that the audience that will cherish “The Emperor’s Children” are the current English majors, starry-eyed with hopes to be a part of the literary scene depicted in the novel. Perhaps, the greatest praise this septuagenarian can give Claire Messud is that I can’t wait for her next novel.

It's 2001 in Manhattan, and each character is trying (with varying levels of commitment) to do something or be someone that matters. Three friends (Marina, Danielle, and Julius) have just turned thirty and are staring down their disappointments -- unfinished book manuscripts, botched projects, failed love affairs, apartments "where pets go to die". Marina's father, renowned social critic Murray Thwaite, is struggling to write what he hopes will be his masterwork. Then his nephew Bootie drops out of college and shows up Murray's door, declaring himself both autodidact and pupil. Meanwhile the aptly named Ludo, a creepy-charming Australian entrepreneur, hopes to take New York (and Murray Thwaite) by storm with his "revolutionary" new magazine. We know the towers will fall in the September portion of the book, and this casts a shadow from the very beginning. When they do fall, the book is consumed -- its characters derailed, its ideas or war on ideas exposed as meaningless. The ending left me disoriented and nervous, unsure where anyone really stood emotionally, why they did what they did, or what they would do next. This was a hard and confusing way to feel when you have been close with them for five-hundred pages. It's a September 12 sort of ending, when processing was deemed unseemly (see: reactions to Susan Sontag's response in that week's New Yorker).

This book is definitely engrossing: its characters richly drawn, its prose lush and impressive. But ultimately it disappointed me, much like New York sometimes does. I've caught more than one real-life whiff of this Manhattan, the faux-sexy banality of publishing, the notion that it creates and controls the Meaning of Life. Sometimes -- I admit -- I do get caught up in the idea that New York, or what it stands for, is the center of something. But I know this is self-indulgent, a coping mechanism -- like I'm wandering around in a lovely black and white postcard with the Empire State Building still under construction or inside the wide windowed waiting room of the former Penn Station. Or I'm by the Flatiron Bldg and snow's falling, and Dorothy Parker's on one arm and Gene Kelley's on the other, Ella Fitzgerald playing in the background, Auden smoking a pipe out that window over there, and John Lennon streaks by naked, bedecked in leis -- and everyone of every race holds hands, smiles and sings "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream" as Rudy Giuliani (oddly in color, inserted in South Park Celebrity Style) announces he's moving to Brazil FOREVER. Then I wake from this reverie, realizing that all of those people (except Rudy) are dead. I worry I'll never have enough money or finish my novel, and then I smell the piss and despair of the subway and feel embarrassed for being as lucky and safe as I am. And then I overhear a designer-clad woman complaining that a guy spent "only" $100 on their first date. And then an angry mother sitting next to me slaps her kid around, telling him to SHUT THE FUCK UP when he's just trying to show her a picture he's drawn. So where was I? This book. Reading it feels like waking from my delusion, then being shown too safely into someone else's, and then someone else's, and finding that each is ugly anew, and feeling judged and wanting someone to blame, and thinking hard, hard, hard about why so many vapid books are published, why nepotism is so rampant, why New Yorkers (both natives and seekers) believe we are at the center of the country and the world. I guess I just wish that this book could have succeeded more in what its protagonists were incapable of: seeing beyond itself.

This book follows three Brown graduates at that crossroads of turning 30, trying to reach their potential and somewhat confused about why they haven't. SO disappointing that there wasn't much insight associated with this book...I was really looking forward to reading it, being a Brown graduate who just dealt with reaching my 30s and having read fantastic reviews of the book. Aside: Why did Messud have to pick on Brown??? There are shallow failures from every school. Okay, enough personal complaining.
I found the writing to be good, but it didn't sweep me away. The characters were boring, obsessed with themselves and their ideas, but not so much with others. They see their function as contributing their ideas, rather than their energy or labor, to society, which might be alright if their ideas were more useful. If Messud's goal was a satire of self-important Ivy-Leaguers, she was effective, but I got the impression that she really thought she had developed meaningful characters that people could learn from. Hmmm.
I was somewhat disappointed in how Messud used September 11 in her book--it is interesting to see how authors are approaching this (kind of interested in one reviewer's dissertation). I felt like she used it as a further excuse for her characters to do nothing, rather than as a real turning point for any of them. Again, being in the age group, a graduate of Brown, and thus acquainted with many people this age who are Ivy League graduates, I found these characters to be a poor representation--I think many people this age, of whatever background, are much more self-possessed, self-motivated, and more conscious of their role in society than these characters, most of whom I would probably actively avoid at parties. Most people learn from their introspection and from those around them, something these characters didn't master. If this was meant to be a satire, it fell short, and if it was meant to be an actual examination of these characters, if fell incredibly short.

I might be forgetting some details of the book, because I traded it at the used book store almost immediately upon completion, but my overall impression of this entire book was failure: failure of the characters to realize that WORK is required to reach goals, even if you are smart and well-educated, failure of the writer to differentiate among types of failure among the characters, failure of the writing to move beyond good to amazing. Perhaps most mysteriously, failure of the NYT book review to properly categorize this book as half-rate chick-lit.

Undermining my enjoyment of 'The Emperor's Children' by Claire Messud was the upper class lifestyle. The denouement of the book failed to conquer the twitch in my lip threatening to become a sneer. These people had great opportunities with which they played stupidly. It all ended up feeling like they flipped out over petty and small worries. My bad, I suppose.

EDIT: January, 2021

Changed stars rating....

There are several things that I did not like about this book. For starters, the writing style and language used was rather arrogant, pompous, and supercilious. Do you get my point? She used multiple adjectives that mean the same thing and also used words that sound like they were straight out of Dawson's Creek. NO ONE talks like that! I think she may have spent more time looking up fancier ways to phrase things rather than on the plot.

I didn't like this book from the beginning and it killed me trying to get through it. I'm not the type to stop reading a book that I started, so I did make it to the end. By the time I was halfway through the book I couldn't have cared less what happened. Then, once I finished it, I closed the book and said "what the...?"

The characters were also impossible to relate to. They are all so egotistical and, not to mention, crazy.

And one more (minor) thing. You don't have to name each chapter. It gets kind of pointless when you're naming them "4th of July (1)," "4th of July (2)," "4th of July (3)," etc.

I enjoyed this book from the first page because it put me into an immediate headspace of glamorous ease — as though I wasn’t reading a used book in my car but drinking a glass of red wine, Succession soundtrack playing lightly in the background, stroking the head of my tiger skinned rug as I scroll through articles in The Cut about petty New York media drama I have no context for understanding. It’s a rich book filled with thick prose as compelling and occasionally pretentious as its characters, a group of educated media elites living in Manhattan in the months leading up to September 11th. Knowing that event is coming means that for readers, the character's ambitions always have a grim bend, as though whatever they reach for or whatever preconceptions they make about their world perpetually exist in a state of queasy falsehood. The book feels dishy and ornamental but also existentially distressing; it made me think about self-delusion, facades, ego, the exhaustibility of entitlement and ambition, and the gap between power held and earned potential.