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.

After adoring Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs, and very much enjoying her latest novel, The Burning Girl, which I read in Florida last year, I was keen to pick up another of her books.  I chose a gorgeous Picador Classics edition of The Emperor's Children, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.  The novel is set in New York in 2001, when 'the whole world shifts'.  In it, Messud explores 'how utterly we are defined by the times in which we live.'

The Independent on Sunday calls Messud's 2006 novel 'a masterpiece', and The Times deems it 'thrillingly real, alive and utterly convincing... [an] intensely pleasurable reminder of the possibilities of the English language'.  The New York Times concurs, writing that 'Messud does a nimble, quicksilver job of portraying her central characters from within and without - showing us their pretensions, frailties and self-delusions, even as she delineates their secret yearnings and fears.'  It is, promises its blurb, a novel which 'brings us face to face with the enduring gap between who we are and who we long to be.'

The Emperor's Children focuses on four characters, three of whom - Danielle Minkoff, Marina Thwaite, and Julius Clarke - became firm friends whilst studying at Brown University during the 1990s.  They are 'young, bright New Yorkers living at America's beating heart in the early years of the twenty-first century', and are joined.  The fourth character is Marina's socially awkward cousin, Frederick Tubb, who is known as Bootie.  He is 'fresh from the provinces and keen to make his mark' on the world.  His arrival causes the three other protagonists to 'confront their desires and leaves them dangerously exposed.'  Also examined in part are the parents of Danielle, Marina, and Bootie. 

Danielle is working as a television producer, Julius makes his living by taking temporary secretarial job, and moneyed Marina has been procrastinating by halfheartedly working on a book for several years.  In his introduction to the volume, Neel Mukherjee describes Marina as the 'aimless daughter of the Thwaites, casting about for something to do and using her ongoing project of writing a book about Americans dress their children... as a kind of displacement activity'.  He calls Julius a 'gay, sharp, bitchy, and... self-invented man'.  Danielle is perhaps, in this way, the only one of the three friends who is making a success of her life, but her story is fraught with problems too.  Bootie has been used as 'one of the oldest tropes in storytelling', as 'a stranger who turns everyone's life upside down'.

Messud's character descriptions are wonderful.  When introducing Bootie's mother, for instance, she writes: 'she felt she walked into the light: the two large windows cast a shadowless opalescence onto the sprigged wallpaper, the family photos on top of the bureau.  Even her discarded stockings, still carrying from yesterday the shape of her solid limbs, appeared outlined in light, luminous.  Her hands and her hair, a grayed cloud, had carried up from the kitchen the smell of coffee, and the vents at her ankles pushed a warm wind around the floor.  In spite of Bootie, in spite, in spite, in this moment at least, she felt happy: she was not too old to love even the snow.'  

Messud is so involved with her characters and their quirks of personality throughout, that one comes to know them intimately.  Throughout the novel, she places very in depth portrayals and explorations of self.  Of Marina, she writes: 'She sometimes felt as though she were a changeling, as hough someone completely new had taken on the identity of Marina Thwaite  - or rather, as if someone who was seen from the outside to be completely new had done so, while beneath the surface she remained unchanged.'  When discussing Julius, Messud notes: 'He was 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: from charming wastrel to needy, boring failure was but a few, too few, short steps.'  Her characters are not entirely likeable, and some are almost odious in their privilege and behaviour. In consequence, I found all of Messud's protagonists, and indeed the secondary figures who orbit around them, wholly believable.

A masterful quality in the novel is the way in which Messud focuses upon the nuances and tiny shifts in relationships, which still have the power to alter them irrevocably.  The Emperor's Children is not overly plot heavy; whilst things happen, particularly toward the final third of the novel, Messud is more interested in the reactions which her characters have to sudden, or brooding, changes in their situations.

There is, as anyone familiar with Messud's writing might expect, an awful lot about morality and politics woven into The Emperor's Children.  Of this, Mukherjee writes: 'Messud's novel is political in the most inclusive, most intelligent understanding of that notion - it looks at the private sphere, at how individuals live in the world, how they conduct their lives, what their moral codes are, to give an indication of the bigger, wider world and the matrix of history in which these private lives are necessarily situated, the private and the public at once shaping and being shaped by each other.'  He goes on to say: 'The questions it poses are enormous and profound.  What is a person's true, authentic self?  Does a life need to be lived in continuous connection with that?  What if the truest idea we have of our true selves is a false one, or one held in bad faith?  Are our notions of authenticity confected, too?'  Whilst Mukherjee's introduction is insightful, and certainly complements the novel, I would recommend that one reads it after finishing the novel, as it is rather revealing, and contains a lot of detailed commentary upon Messud's characters and plot points.

Before beginning The Emperor's Children, I was surprised to see so many negative reviews of it smattered on its Goodreads page.  I am so pleased that I ignored these and read it regardless, as I ended up absolutely loving it, and found something to admire on every page.  Messud's writing provides a breath of fresh air, and gives one the ability to see characters and events, such as 9/11, from different angles.  She is a unique author in many ways, but her prose style at times reminded me of Donna Tartt and Zoe Heller, merely due to the weight which it holds within its words.  I can see why some might think that Messud's prose is overwritten, but I found it both rich and sumptuous, as well as entirely absorbing.  There is so much which can be unpicked within its pages, and I am sure that I will be thinking about it for months to come.

The Emperor's Children is a phenomenal, searching novel, filled with profound meditations on life.  Everything within it has been wonderfully handled, and it provokes thought at every turn.  She also writes with poignant and moving language of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers, which profoundly affect every character.  As with her other books, I was absolutely blown away with this novel.  Messud is an interesting, original writer, and I very much look forward to exploring the rest of her oeuvre in the near future.

I have to admit that I didn't hate this book as much as many, MANY other people did (see reviews here or on Amazon). If we had the chance to rate books with half stars I would definitely give this book 3.5 stars. The first half of the book really grabbed my attention and the writing is beautiful (although at times I was distracted by the author's extensive vocabulary usage). The characters were not likable but I found them to be believable. I was hoping the author would delve deeper into the friendship between the three main characters but she never really does and so I'm left to wonder why these three were friends at all. The second half of the book loses some it's focus and the more interesting story lines and conflicts get dropped. I actually found myself hurrying through the last part of the book just so I could be finished with it.

I wouldn't necessarily NOT recommend it to people though if only for the first 400 pages or so. It's an intelligent read and her writing is quite lovely. I also don't know if I would tout this as a 9/11 book as that whole plot seemed secondary to the book on a whole.

Fun "first years out of college, living in New York" read (though the characters are 30). In addition to tracking the lives of three 30-year-olds (and one 19-year-old), we also somewhat follow a few middle-aged characters, and that in addition to a very big heavy real-life world event that comes in towards the end of the novel made it feel a lot more substantive than "fun post-college read" might sound. I would recommend this to anyone who's into stuff about figuring yourself out after college, about the media and literary world, and about a certain privileged liberal NYC type. This was also a great length - reads fast enough that it feels very satisfying to finish, but is also not so short as to feel thin or insubstantial.

One drawback for me was that it did feel like each of the characters was playing a certain "type," like that they existed in order to make snarky points about that type of person or social class (privileged pretty girl, vain middle-aged thought leader guy, ambitious gay dude, etc.), which took away from a sense of their interiority and made them feel less real. I think for some people that would actually make the novel even more entertaining though. I personally am just not that into that kind of satire-ish feel. That said, sometimes the snarky points were so spot-on that I was won over.

EVERYONE IN NEW YORK HAS SEX WITH EACH OTHER.

Also, this is an actual sentence:

"But for right now, on the Sunday evening the week after the wedding, it just felt as though she were married not to a man but to The Monitor; or rather, that she was not married at all, because it was after nine p.m. and she had packed in hours ago - the issue in all its glory wouldn't be sent to the printer until Tuesday night and her part was done, for this first time at least, and the pieces for her section in the second issue edited and ready to go, and only Ludo still had tweaking and fussing and frankly obsessing to do, because the issue was finished, even for him, there was nothing to be done, it was Sunday night for God's sake and the final checks could be made on Monday, or even Tuesday, even till late Tuesday night if need be blah blah blah blah blah blah blah..."

What is this book about????

For fun I started saying "in bed" every time there was a comma. Ludo still had fussing and frankly obsessing to do in bed, because the issue was finished in bed, even for him in bed, there was nothing to be done in bed, it was Sunday night for God's sake and the final checks could be made on Monday in bed, or even Tuesday in bed, even till late Tuesday night if need be!!!! In bed!!!!! Bed office! So much productivity in bed! Fuck yeah, time to work in bed! Give me that checkbook, I'm making it rain in bed!

Avoid avoid avoid avoid.