This book took me a while to read. It's loosely about a group of three friends who are in that weird stage of living at the end of their 20s/beginning of their 30s, when life is not going as well as they had planned. Their lives dissect from each other. On the one hand it reminds me of the J.M. Coetze novel I read (Disgrace) in its treatment of middle-aged academics, but on the other hand the characters are so unique and real and inconsistent, just like real people. The story is set in New York, and 9/11 happens near the end of the story, which had an interesting parallel to the events happening to each character. This isn't a book for light reading, but I would definitely recommend it. I feel like I'll continue thinking about the characters after today. And unlike the Picoult, I felt like the ending was well-suited to the rest of the novel. It was heading there the entire time.

A few quotations about reading, relationships, and (bad) writing:
"'That's what it means to be civilized. Novels, history, philosophy, science - the lot. You expose yourself to as much as possible, you absorb it, you forget most of it, but along the way it's changed you.'
'But you don't forget things.'
'Of course I do. Writing helps. When you write about something, when you really think about it, you know it in a different way.'"

"Sometimes pretense was the best you could hope for."

"You'd think the people who love you best could behave a little less selfishly, wouldn't you?... Why can't they behave like you and be genuinely happy for me?"

"It's narcissism, to love a wall and resent it for not loving you back. It's perversity. Love is mutual, it flourishes in reciprocity. You can't have real love without a return of affection - otherwise, it's just obsession and projection."

"...It's a nobler thing to do to write a good book about, say, cheese - a useful, plain-speaking guide to cheese - than another crappy novel."

I remember hearing great things about this book when it came out about five years ago, but it was the kind of praise that didn't really resonate with me. Fast-forward to the present, and now having it read it, I can see why. The book is a truly mystifying mess of fairly stock characters engaged in the most egregious privileged Manhattanite navel-gazing imaginable, written in outrageously pretentious and contorted run-on sentences. I would have gladly abandoned the book after fifty pages in the presence of these vacuous people, but since this was a book club selection, I persevered to the bitter end.

The story revolves (more or less) around Murray Thwaite, an iconic middle-aged journalist who built a predictable (and rewarding) career as the kind of "conscience of the '60s generation" writer, with pompous and cliched liberal views are tempered enough to be palatable to a broad Democratic-voting audience. His beautiful daughter Marina adores him and is so overcome by his greatness that she's basically wasted the decade since she graduated Brown, and is just drifting along. Her Brown friends Danielle (single documentary producer) and Julius (gay literary critic and office temp) are similarly adrift in a 30something sea of angst, wishing to be doing something "important", but without any idea what that might be. Gliding by in the background is Murray's wife, who is a kind of modern version of the '50s housewife: a lawyer who helps troubled youth, and a wife who turns a blind eye to her husband's infidelities and excesses -- and not coincidentally, the only person in the book who actually is doing something worthwhile.

Fortunately, there are two characters who arrive to the scene who appear poised to wreak havoc to this insular world. The first is a smarmy Australian editor named Ludovic Seely who meets Danielle at a party and soon becomes romantically involved with Marina. He's been sent to New York by his Rupert Murdochian media conglomerate to launch an iconoclastic weekly magazine whose "telling it like it is" barbs will be aimed directly at the people who like Murray Twaite. Meanwhile, in a small town upstate, Murray's 19-year-old nephew Bootie Tubb plots to come to the big city and make something of himself, although again, what that is, is not clear. He's a kind of loner autodidact, keen to read and grapple with the great works of literature outside of the stultifying world of academia. And for a while, the story appears to be building toward a satisfying takedown of Twaite, only to have that fizzle into nothingness. Then 9/11 arrives, and the world is turned upside down, only not so much for the characters in the book. To be sure, it affects them, but not in any considerable way -- aside from Bootie. It would be spoiling things to say what happens to him, but it's far from satisfying and involves a fairly outrageous coincidence. (Perhaps this is the book's most salient point? That that even 9/11 can't get these flawed people to be honest with themselves for even a moment?)

I guess the book did succeed in one regard -- our bookclub spent an engaging 90 minutes trying to figure out what the point of it all was. One could almost make an interesting case that it's a thinly veiled right-wing attack on wishy-washy liberals and their Manhattan Mecca. It's not at all clear whether the author is satirizing her characters or sympathizing with them, or both at once, or trying to do the first while unconsciously doing the second... Whatever the case, another reviewer pointed out the danger of exploring vacuity over 400 pages, and in my reading, this book falls down its own rabbit hole. In an interview, the author said "In some sort of grandiose way, I thought of the emperor as the broader culture, if that makes any sense. It’s about the times that we live in." I guess I can't fault the ambition, but any book about "the times we live in" is all but destined to fail -- and in failing to present a single iota of original perspective, this one surely does.

I found "The Emperor's Children" incredibly disappointing. The reviews I had read just raved and raved, but I disliked it intensely. Shallow, solipsistic characters about whom I couldn't even bring myself to care - neither could the author apparently, as some were nothing more than lazy ciphers - the guy from Australia, Julius's boyfriend, the wife. Good God, if you are going to stoop to the jaded device of bringing in an alienated outsider to stir things up, please take the time at least to develop the character beyond the level of caricature. And allow him to wear shoes, damn it!


There are already plenty of books in existence in which pompous academic males seduce women half their age. Similarly, there is no shortage of books in which people in their twenties pass their time in self-absorbed navelgazing and low-level whining. Is this ground sufficiently fertile to warrant another visit? On the basis of this over-hyped mess of a book, I'd have to think not.


The most annoying aspect of this book is the lazy way in which Messaud invokes the September 11th attacks as the ultimate deus ex machina to resolve the meandering, not particularly interesting, plot. It's as if tragedy trumps everything, including the author's responsibility to write a story that's credible. Messaud's writing style is fluid and the book is very readable, but given the shallowness of the characters and the author's laziness about the plot, the return on investment of time is low.

This is my generation, what can I say? Educated in the best of institutions, overburdened by self-analysis, underemployed, wondering what it will all lead to after our parents have cut the umbilical cord finally. How could it not resonate?

The first chapter seemed so much like an airport romance novel that I almost stopped reading, sure I had gotten this book confused with another. I wish I had stopped then, or I wish it would have been a flighty romance. Instead, I cringed my way through this sophomoric Love Actually-meets-existentialism and its stilted dialogue and pretentious pseudo-philosophic prose only to be put off *SPOILER-ISH ALERT* by the author's reliance on 9/11 as a pivot point for all of the characters. I'm not against the use of a national tragedy as a major plot point -- I really liked Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close -- but Messud used 9/11 to spur all of her characters to take drastic (and mostly predictable) actions in their lives. It seemed forced, and I was really turned off by the laziness of it all. Also, for god's sake, sentences that run half a page and include innumerable phrases set off by m-dashes, parentheses, and semicolons are confusing! I plow my way through them in legal texts and Russian classics, but in a book this light on substance, that style is totally unnecessary and counterproductive.

I was excited to read this book since it had so much "buzz" surrounding it. While it was fine and read quickly, I found myself wondering "who cares?" None of the characters were particularly likeable and the plot wasn't very interesting.

“‘Entitlement,’ said Danielle. ‘It’s about a sense of entitlement….’”
-tClaire Messud, The Emperor’s Children

The above line pretty much sums up the book.

And it’s not a theme that’s altogether appealing.

Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children is a very familiar story. As soon as you start reading it, you get the sense that you’ve been here before. Many times. The setting is New York City, where roughly 64% of all novels take place, and the characters – over-educated young people imbued with the unexamined fortune of advantaged upbringings – have been done before.

Again, many times.

So, why am I here?

This isn’t a book I’d normally pick up. I found it – of all places – on a list of the best novels about the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. What intrigued me is that this had little to do with the attacks themselves – this is not a thriller about FBI or CIA Agents, or the people in the planes, or the Towers, or with the box cutters – but about the time just before.

Before times have always interested me. The moments before an epoch ends, and a new one begins. The classic example is the summer of 1914, with an unassuming Europe heading for an unimaginable catastrophe.

The Emperor’s Children tries to capture that vibe, of people who think that things are going one way, even though they’re about to go another. When this novel begins, we are fresh off the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dot com bubble, living in a country obsessed with shark attacks and a missing D.C. intern. When this novel begins, it is impossible to imagine almost two decades of war, color-coded threat levels, politicized fear, and a global reordering.

***

Our three main characters are Marina, Danielle, and Julius. All of them have New York Problems™, which don’t really feel like problems at all, if you don’t happen to live in the Big Apple.

All three friends went to Brown together, entered the workforce together in media-type jobs (of course), and together came to the realization that life wasn’t necessarily giving them what they thought they deserved. All three flashed early, in their twenties, and now seem to have run into personal and professional dead ends in their thirties.

Danielle is probably the most put together, holding a steady job as a public television producer. Julius was once a critic for the Village Voice, but now gets by on temp work. At one of those assignments, he begins dating his boss, David, a wealthy Wall Street type (there’s one in every New York novel). Marina is the daughter of famed celebrity journalist Murray Thwaite, and she is still partially coasting on that status. She is beautiful – a former teen model – and has a book project about…[checks notes]…the social history of children’s clothing that she has been working to complete for years.

These professions all made me chuckle, not because they are intended to be funny, but because they are exactly what I expected. Like I said up top, this is familiar ground: a fantasy NYC that is about to get a jarring brush with reality. In any event, the novel’s drama – low key as it is – runs through the interactions of these three: how they play off each other, envy each other, think about each other.

***

At 479 pages, this is a relatively big novel that reads small. It’s amazing how swiftly it moves, and how engrossing it is, despite lacking any memorable set pieces, and despite the narcissistic navel-gazing that is as New York as the Statue of Liberty.

I’ve seen Messud compared to Tom Wolfe, and certainly, they are both keen observers of privileged New Yorkers. But this is nothing like The Bonfire of the Vanities. Everything about Bonfire was big. The dazzlingly cinematic sequences. The manic internal monologues. It featured indelible phrasemaking, a gross ton of exclamation points (!!!), and a broad cross-section of America’s biggest city serving as characters. The Emperor’s Children is far more humble and subdued. I don’t think it has a single “great” scene; there are at least five, and as many as ten unforgettable sequences in Bonfire.

Messud’s ambitions and storytelling are fairly circumscribed. She is honing in on a very particular age-group, in a very specific cohort. There is particularity in her writing, not universality. Yet she captures that small segment of society pretty convincingly. Her portrayals feel exact and spot-on, even if not plumbed for psychological depth.

***

Like every other book in my reading life, I came late to The Emperor’s Children, which was a semi-big deal when it was first published in 2006. At least, it was a semi-big deal within the hermetically sealed world of New York City opinion-makers.

The reactions from ordinary reviewers has been much more mixed, and understandably so. This is minor drama among people who have it pretty good, so it is tough to fully invest in their day-to-day concerns. Perhaps this works best as a “comedy of manners,” satirizing a particular social group with some decent characterizations. Mainly, I kept reading because hovering above The Emperor’s Children is the looming shadow of that day.

***

To Messud’s credit, there is no foreshadowing, no ominous tones, just the passing of months as we slip towards September 2001. What you think about this structuring will determine how well you think The Emperor’s Children works. Some readers will see this as a lazy, exploitative terrorist ex machina that clumsily caps a meandering piffle of a book. An ending that is sloppy at best, insulting at worst.

For whatever reason, I thought it succeeded just well enough. The knowledge of what is coming – what these characters cannot know – gives this novel a strange tick-tock sensation. It’s a mildly amusing, unessential book, but nevertheless gains something by dint of the fact that an hourglass is invisibly draining in every scene. Even when there isn’t much happening, there is an inherent tension; we know that everything is going to change very soon. It’s a cheap trick, I suppose, but cheap tricks can be effective. I liked the contrast between the quotidian worries of her characters and the world-historical event bearing down on them. Yes, the troubles of Messud’s thirty-somethings pale in comparison to New York’s awful Tuesday morning. But that’s sort of the whole point – that these people were really living with their heads firmly implanted in their own asses.

***

In the immediate, raw aftermath of September 11, 2001, many Americans who had not been personally touched by the attacks still found it hard to process. There was talk that violent movies would disappear. Anyone who made a joke or irreverent comment could find themselves losing a job. The phrase “too soon” was repeated endlessly. There was a strange belief that fiction should somehow avoid this day entirely, even though the shelves of libraries and bookstores bend beneath the weight of novels set against events far more cataclysmic.

When Messud wrote this, we were still really close to the event itself, so it took some guts on her part to weave this particular tale. Ultimately, she manages to capture a very particular milieu: that fleeting interstice between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the never-ending War on Terror. It’s interesting to look back at that time, and get a sense, even if its skewed, of how people thought, talked, dreamed, and conceived the pathways of the universe. In a way, then, the older this novel gets, the farther from 2001 it drifts, the more power it actually holds.

Claire Messud's "The Emperor's Children"

Claire Messud's novel, "The Emperor's Children" (2006) is a challenging, if only partially successful, satire of modern urban secularism set in New York City in 2001. In part a comedy of manners and in part a novel of ideas, the book deals diffusely with the pretensions and difficulties of intellectual life.

I think there are two interrelated groups of central characters in the novel. The first group consists of two people: Murray Thwaite, an aging liberal writer and social critic whose opinions and publications have come to command a nation-wide following. Thwaite's wife is an attorney with a career and life of her own, as she specializes in representing troubled young people. Thwaite has a manuscript in his desk which he hopes to publish someday setting forth in aphoristic form the insights he believes he has won over the years into the good life. Thwaite is also a philanderer and becomes involved, in this book, with a 30 year old woman named Danielle, discussed below. Thwaite has a nephew, Frederick "Booty" Tubb who has dropped out of college and who reads writers including Emerson and Robert Musil. Thwaite hires Booty as a private secretary, and Booty betrays this trust by writing a highly uncomplimentary article based upon Thwaite's draft and unpublished manuscript and on his observations of Thwaite's private life.

The second group of main characters consists of three college friends who are about 30 years of age. Thwaite's daughter Mariana is an aspiring writer who has been struggling for several years to complete a book on children's clothing and its impact on society's view of people. Her friend Danielle is an aspiring producer of documentaries. Their common friend Julius is a free-lance writer who struggles to get by writing reviews. (shades of online reviewing!) Each of the three characters is unmarried as the story opens. Marina and Danielle become rivals for the attention of Ludovic Seely, an Australian who has moved to New York to found a satirical magazine critical of pretension. Seely marries Marina, in the hope of furthering his prospects, and Danielle becomes involved in an affair with Thwaite. Julius is gay and in the midst of what will prove to be an unhappy and destructive relationship.

The plotting in the book is awkward and the scenes of New York City life are not strikingly drawn. I understand the frustrations of many of my fellow online reviews who did not like this book. But I found the book provocative as a novel of ideas, and this in some measure redeemed it for me. The characters in the story each have their strengths and weaknesses, but they all tend to be self-centered. More importantly, they tend to be, even the successful Murray Thwaite, individuals suffering from a sense of uncertainty in finding a meaning in their lives. Messud writes about the respective situations of the characters without offering any easy answers in a way I found helpful.

In her look at the unfulfilling lives of her characters, Messud alludes many times to two factors I found striking. The first was the professed atheism or agnosticism of every character in the book which, Messud suggests, may have more than a little to do with their vacillating sense of life. But Messud offers a complex vision in which a return to religion is not a panacea. In one of the best moments of the novel, when Thwaite's wife has to interrupt a family holiday to help a young man who has been arrested, she declines to advise the troubled youth to turn to religion as a possible way to mitigate his troubles. Even if religion could be shown to help in such cases, she says, she is a nonbeliever herself, and would not feel she was acting properly in recommending a possible course of action in which she did not herself believe to a young person she was charged with helping. In the discussions of religion and secularism in the book, Messud explores an issue that remains troubling to many people.

The second factor that Messud explores with some subtlety involves gender issues. Messud makes a great deal of the liberal paterfamilias, Murray Twaite and his paternalism and philandering. But she has much more to offer than this somewhat tired critique. The young people in the book all show , at the age of 30, the greatest difficulty in establishing lasting heterosexual relationships. Julius is involved in a gay relationship and remarks at one point that the advantage of such arrangements is that the couple makes its own rules, free of what he claims to be the biases of society. His relationship unravels dramatically, but the point he tries to make about gay relationships seems to apply to all male-female relationships in a modernistic age: the couples make their own rules without standards to help or guide them. (The tie-in with secularism here is, I think, strong.) There is a feeling of sadness in this book that at the age of 30 both Danielle and Marina are floundering in the careers and have shown their inability to make a lasting sexual and loving connection for themselves.

I found a strong temptation in reading this book to see the author as suggesting a return to religion and to a sense of stable, nonfeminist gender expectations as part of a solution to the problems she develops in the book. (Most satire is fundamentally conservative.) But as she develops the character of "Booty" and to some extent the character of Murray Thwaite, I think she turns away from this conservative position. The book left me with the feeling, as she states in several places, that every person must make his or her own way in life. The lodestars are the authors to which Booty is devoted: Emerson, the prototypical American with his sense of the person creating himself anew and Musil, the modernist with his sense of ambiguity and of the difficulty of fixity. This is not a pretty or an easy way but, Messud to me suggests, it is all we have.

"The Emperor's Children" is not a pretty or an easy book. But in the issues it explores it is thoughtful. Readers who are interested in sharper satirical portraits of intellectual life in New York City might enjoy the novels of Dawn Powell, whose works are available in the Library of America series.

Robin Friedman

It's no secret how The Emperor's Children will end. Claire Messud's novel follows a group of New Yorkers, all connected in some way, during the summer and fall of 2001, culminating with the terrorist attacks of September 11. The tragedy is unavoidable and, for the reader, completely foreseen. But this isn't a book about September 11. Messud doesn't rely on or construct her story around the impending disaster like, say, something like Titanic does. What's important here is not that the tragedy occurs, but how it changes the characters, how it suddenly reveals who they really are, and how it echoes some of the novel's main themes, particularly this: You are not as important or invulnerable as you think you are.

Three ambitious, idealistic friends from college (Marina, Danielle, and Julius) are now thirty years old, struggling with the creeping doubt that their lives are destined to be ordinary after all. Marina's pretending to write a book for which she's already spent her entire advance. Danielle's a television producer, frustrated at having to curb her abstract ideas for higher ratings. Julius, after a successful stint as a cultural critic, now merely plays at being in the "it crowd." To make matters worse, they all live under the long shadow of Murray Thwaite, Marina's father, a wildly popular journalist and social activist, who is similarly, and secretly, lost.

As much a novel about growing up as it is about the illusions of power, The Emperor's Children alternates between each character, giving the reader glances of their insecurities and fears. When Messud introduces two other people to this world, things go slowly awry. With long, fluid sentences, she describes these polite betrayals and social hypocrisy beautifully, but Messud's characters are not nearly as captivating and charismatic as she wants them to be, and we're stuck inside their rambling thoughts, which are often repetitive. It's not that The Emperor's Children has no clothes, it's just that its clothes aren't as shiny as you may have heard.

"Wasn't irrelevance, smallness, the dutiful petty life what everyone ultimately wanted to shed? And wasn't shedding as important as embracing, in the formation of an adult self?"

This book came in for a drubbing from the Goodreads community that was very much at odds with the fulsome praise on its back cover. Where I shall I situate myself on this continuum of blame to praise?

At over 400 pages, The Emperor's Children is long, but I raced through it, inhaling sections like I've been known to do with big bowls of salty, buttery popcorn. This may have something to do with where I'm at, right now -- craving the kind of escape that narrative provides -- but it's also a testament to the author's knack for pacing. It's a long book made up of very short chapters, and I got addicted to running from porthole to porthole, peering in at the characters and plot-lines in quick succession. I stayed up way past my bedtime last night, to finish.

I think The Emperor's Children is trying to be an old-fashioned novel (the dust-cover praise mentions Wharton, Fitzgerald, and Waugh) about new times and new things. I think that's an interesting goal, in these subjectivity-obsessed times of ours. The narrator is omniscient and removed but all-seeing. The characters span a (fairly) wide range of ages and social backgrounds. The author strives for a timeless, stately tone, too. Most of the time she succeeds. Somebody already pointed out her Jamesian long sentences. Usually it's lovely. She likes to avoid split infinitives by putting the adjective before the infinitive rather than after it ("boldly to go," "naturally to finish"), which sounds a little high-flown, but it works with it.

About a third of the way in, I found myself wondering how we are meant to take the characters in this book, as in, how seriously, and how we are to judge them, because there does seem to be an invitation to judgment. (It is, after all, a novel of manners. That's what we're supposed to do with them, right?) Some of the reviewers seem inclined to write the book off because they deem the characters to be shallow, but I think that some degree of shallowness, or hypocrisy, was the point. Actually, I'd like to get into this conversation with someone...is the book supposed to be an indictment of the people in it, or the world it portrays? What's 9/11 doing at the end, anyway, besides being climactic?

In the end, I think I enjoyed the novel more as a fast-moving story and as a very vivid collection of details from disparate worlds than I did as a commentary on social life or a portrait of inner life, if that makes sense. Even though some of the characters failed to inspire my sympathy at times, I continued to be curious about what was going to happen to them next. More than anything else, what struck me was Claire Messud's facility with details. We get the minutest descriptions of the inside of a grubby shared college house, right down to the slimy chain you have to plunge your hand into the tank to retrieve before flushing, and then the precise contents of the fridge at an Upper West Side apartment facing the Park, then the exact books and CDs on the shelves of a 30-year-old working woman's studio. For every detail that seemed a little bit off, and there were a few that I was inclined to cavil at because they don't match MY reality, there were a handful of others that made me think, 'my god! She's not supposed to KNOW this stuff!'

In any case, I'll doubtless think about this book often if only because the building where the character Danielle Minkoff, the book's moral center, was supposed to have lived really exists, and is clearly visible from the corner where I catch the subway to come home from work.

Writers about New York City have a peculiar advantage and disadvantage that way, it seems. There are a lot of eyes in this city, and while everybody likes reading about something they have a personal experience of, everybody's quick to jump on the person who gets it even a little bit wrong. I'm a New Yorker (five-ish years here?) and nearing 30 and while I don't feel that Marina's, Julius's, or even Danielle's world maps perfectly onto mine, it'd be churlish not to admit that there are a few points of contact, or that reading about the familiar/unfamiliar world these characters inhabit isn't good fun.

I had wanted to read this book for a long time and chose it for my book club. This was a very hard book to read, very hard to care about the characters but it took me over 1/2 through the book to start to be interested in the characters. This book had a lot of words on a page and a lot of "big" words. The story in relation to the title was very interesting and I've read this is being made into a movie which was another reason i wanted to read it and I'm sure it will be a good movie. All the characters were very interesting. The only one I really felt bad for was "Bootie". All the others brought their problems on themselves.

Oh man. Mark couldn't have gotten it more right.