I did not like this, so it gets only one star.

As I plodded through this I kept wondering what the book was trying to say. It is about growing up, standing on your own two feet and making your own way. We look at three kids who have graduated from Brown University, two girls and a gay guy. They are all approaching thirty and the year is 2001. All are floundering in every way imaginable, both on a personal level and in getting themselves established in a career. All are extremely naive and terribly shallow. Some of the parents equally so. More importantly, the author fails to give to the characters adequate depth that might allow the reader to feel sorry for them or feel empathy for them, thus allowing the reader to forgive their childish and nasty behavior. Because no sympathy is created, the tale becomes overly long, drawn out and boring.

The story is trite. We bring in a foreigner and he messes things up. That is the story in a nutshell.

I disliked how the author throws in unnecessarily fancy words. They confuse and do not enhance one’s appreciation. Neither was I impressed.

I had the feeling I was supposed to be laughing at some of the lines. Perhaps this was meant to be a satire of academia, but I never laughed. No, not once. At other times, I found the "humor" crude and childish. The homosexual innuendos, which might be laughed at by some, put me off.

So that you have been warned - the language is at times filthy, but worse than that you have to spend hours at cocktail parties, gay bars and clubs, and listening to superficial chatter. Drugs are part of the scene. Illicit love affairs, do they attract you? I hope so, if you intend on spending time with this book. The life style of the people we meet, quite simply bored me to death!

Then there is the ending, and I do not want to give any spoilers, but I will simply say it ends with 9/11. I found using 9/11 as a means of resolving issues within the story extremely weak.

The audiobook is superbly executed by Suzanne Toren. This is about the only think I can praise the book for, by that I mean the audiobook. She is totally fantastic. Men and women, and academics and gay men and Australians, she gets them all right. You understand every word that she says and her intonations cannot be improved upon. The problem is, if you dislike the characters as I did, you must listen to their inane chatter. I have given the narration five stars.

På sitt sätt välskriven, ändå har jag svårt att fastna i den. Vissa bitar, vissa kapitel rent av, känns riktigt intressanta, andra läser jag pliktskyldigt. Jag har svårt att engagera mig i personerna på djupet, även om den senare delen, skildringen av elfte september, känns påtagligt aktuell med minnet av hur alla planer gick om intet under vintern/våren 2020 i färskt minne.

Is Claire Messud Wearing Any Clothes?

This is a question I have been sleeping fitfully on. I finished The Emperor's Children last night and I really wanted to be able to post a wholly enthusiastic assessment of it here, but I can't. First, let's get rid of business. This is a book that has to appear in the epilogue of my dissertation, which discusses literary reactions to the Sept. 11 attacks. My primary focus here is going to be on how in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Jonathan Safran Foer uses the figure and style of the child as a way of modeling what he takes to be an ethical or appropriate literary response to an event which, it seems clear, reminds him of the Holocaust, Dresden, Hiroshima, etc. Messud approaches Sept. 11 more directly, making it a crucial hinge around which her handful of her plots resolve themselves. Sept. 11 changes her characters. In short, it does the work that she ought to be doing for herself as a novelist.

But before dealing with its problems, I should admit I really enjoyed the first three parts of the novel, the first three hundred pages. Messud is good at writing one kind of sentence--a sort of Henry James Lite sentence--but it's a beautiful sentence and can achieve impressive effects at the level of the paragraph and the chapter. Some of the novel's early chapters are really terrific, scathingly ironic in the best way. Their satirical edge was what compelled me to buy the book in the first place. Unfortunately Messud becomes a victim of her own success; she flails when she tries to deviate from her standard style. Efforts at writing fake newspaper columns or at miming styles other than her preferred style creak awkwardly. This is a symptom of the fact that Messud has problems writing characters with depth and dimension. Everyone speaks like everyone else, thinks like everyone else, experiencing the world through the prisim of her Henry James Lite style, which at first seems as if it's an ironic commentary on how the minds of these characters work but turns instead into an inadvertently commentary on Messud herself.

What differentiates her two female protagonists, Danielle and Marina, are relative levels of beauty. Her two main gay characters, Julius and David, though supposedly very different sorts of gay men, end up seeming like catty clones of each other, stereotypes incarnate. Murray Thwaite, the intellectual luminary at the center of the narrative--the "emperor" of the title--is also paper thin. His intellectual pedigree and his esteem in the liberal community is often referred to but not persuasively demonstrated; he manages not to say even one smart thing in 470 pages, which may be part of her point, but Messud does not do enough to build him up before she tears him down.

Only Booty, Murray's nephew, rises above the words on the page that describe him. Only he makes a meaningful choice when confronted with the the terrorist attacks, and a hilarious one at that. The rest of the characters here are constitutionally unable to make meaningful choices because their personhood has not been sufficiently developed in what preceded the moment of the attack. Danielle becomes depressed. Murray remains more or less the same. Marina and Julius are only superficially scarred. I came to this novel prepared to like it--hell, even to love it--and for about 300 pages I did, on its own terms, in its own style. Once September rolled around, the whole thing fell apart for me. Which does not of course mean I won't write about the book in my dissertation. I will.

Spoiled thirty-somethings in New York City seek greater self-importance while interesting poor kid tries to make good and is shunned. Yay. Why do I keep turning the pages?

Oh right, because I’m a thirty-something in New York City. Unfortunately, the thirty-somethings in the novel are very different (hopefully) and much less interesting (again, hopefully).

To her credit, Messud’s writing, aside from an occasional bout of hyperverbosity, is spot on; she captures the emptiness of her characters beautifully. They live more in their fancy than in reality, trusting their ideas of other people and the world around them more than the evidence that stares them in the face. They navigate the world through the blinders of privilege and carry torches for irresponsibility and whim. They are modern day Buchanans.

But with only Bootie, the curious and incisive out-of-towner, to play the role of Nick—Bootie, who comes and goes in the text—the novel doesn’t deliver the way The Great Gatsby does. Bootie is certainly the protagonist of the novel, but he exists too far from the center of the novel, and as a result, his revelations are too much like easily overlooked footnotes.

Further, the events of 9/11 are a disappointing deus ex machina. They force a few characters to reevaluate their priorities, but they avert the confrontations that would really test and reveal the characters’ values. Characters are pushed into a forced retreat, and we are left feeling bitter that the dastards haven’t received their due.

But maybe that’s the point. Are we meant to be sympathetic to the characters, or is The Emperor’s Children a scathing criticism? The title would suggest the latter. The characters believe in their trappings, and we can see right through them. But if this is Messud’s plan, it seems to me that she indulges them a little too much. She gives us too much time with the Thwaites and the Seeleys, and we’re let into their thoughts a little too much.

Which brings me to the narrator. I’ve written before that the third-person omniscient narrator, with some authors, turns into a wildly unstable voice. Characters’ thoughts and mannerisms often slip in and out of the narrative without any announcement. Messud falls into this trap. I haven’t decided yet whether I think this is a problem, but it continues, in my mind, to be a source of inconsistency in the prose.

All told, I must confess that once I forced myself through the first fifty pages, I was hooked on the plot. It was like reading celebrity magazines. I couldn’t help but be curious about the trials and tribulations of the rich and famous. Is that, too, Messud’s point? ...that we succumb to our own titillation and secretly wish the downfall of those we ogle?

Do I recommend it? Maybe for the beach. There are so many other books to read…
Would I teach it? Nope. Too much emperor, not enough people seeing through his clothes.
Lasting impressions: Unsatisfied. Messud’s story offers some brain candy, some subtle commentary, and a few too many descriptions of West Side apartment lobbies.

Maybe the best example I've ever found of the disconnect between what the average reader enjoys and what literary critics say is good.

Painfully overwritten, what is this? And you call this "A new york times book review BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR"?????

I mean thank u for like making me look at the dictionary in every page but it kinda just feels like what i do with my school essays sometimes,

Look in the dictionary for synonyms preferably the deep deep ones too reach the minimum word count but in this case, the author wants to have LENGTHY LENGTHY LENGTHY LENGTHY LENGTHY LENGTHY LENGTHY LENGTHY LENGTHY book

I didn’t start to get into this one until about 200 pages in, when out of nowhere came intrigue! scandal! Until that point the characters came across as either too irritating or too false to grab me. (Seriously, Ludovic Seeley? Bootie Tubb? Sounds like a cartoon villain and his sidekick.)

I did find myself drawn in, though, around page 200 as I said, and there were many instances at which I did really admire the author’s writing—whether for a particular turn of phrase or a keenly drawn insight. And then there were things like this:

“She, who had felt she saw so clearly that it hurt, had felt that the truth, crystalline, was, with Murray, granted her (though not through his help, or anything he did: but just by his presence; as though, indeed, he were but a part of her that had been lost, a magnificent Platonic epiphany repeated, and daily repeated: this, surely, was love!), felt, now, that the weight of emotion lay like a veil, a fine mist.”

I’m sorry, what? Come again? It’s like watching a Gilmore Girls marathon—too many words! Somebody give the copyeditor a raise for keeping track of all those commas (17, I counted). I think I might actually understand the sentence now, but that’s after having read it 30 times. I don’t think authors should water down their prose for easy reading, but I sometimes found it difficult to see what purpose Messud’s stylistic choices served.

Although some of the characters felt incredibly false to me initially, they became more believable (though no more loveable) as the book unfolded. I don’t mind not liking the characters in a book, but I do want to like reading about them; and that often wasn’t the case with this novel. An interesting part of the reading experience for me, though, was how I could at once be critical of the characters and sheepishly cognizant of my own unfortunate resemblance to them.

I laughed at Bootie’s (Seriously, Bootie Tubb?) pseudo-intellectual posturing and (adolescent) search for meaning! truth! but I quote Emerson to myself in earnest. I rolled my eyes at Marina and her whole “I want to do something important” routine. “So do it already and shut up!” I tell her (and myself). In his novel Everyman (which I haven’t read), Phillip Roth has one of his characters quote painter and photographer Chuck Close: “Amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work.” Marina and her crew were an uncomfortable reminder of the luxury of being able to look for inspiration! and meaning! and how easily we (I) can take that indulgence for granted.

Wow. Okay, this review has turned out to be much longer than I’d planned to make it, so I’ll quit now before I commit all the sins I’ve just complained about!! ;) Too, late? ,? ,?

In summary: some things I really liked, others not so much…on balance, the book was just okay.

As I did not finish this book, I debated with myself whether I should give this 1 or 2 stars. I want to be fair after all, not having read the whole book.

Why did I stop reading, you ask? The purple prose. The god damn fucking purple prose. Two chapters in, and ultimately I decided that life was too short to slog through overly verbose descriptions about shallow people and their actions/decisions. There were so many paragraphs here that could have been easily condensed into two sentences and still not lost their meaning.

It's obvious the author worked hard on this, but it also feels like she abused a thesaurus and tried to be as... um, 'literary' as possible by using descriptions she likely thought sounded intelligent, but ultimately fell flat.

Painfully overwritten. You can almost feel Messud pausing at points to thumb through a thesaurus.

I plucked this from the shelf at Goodwill, noticed the cover was emblazoned with award stickers and literary raves, and recognized a bargain (especially with the senior citizen discount). Once I got it home, however, I soon began to feel I was earning my $1.00. Chapter 1 begins amidst cocktails and artsy dinner party prattle in what turns out to be Australia (telltale mentions of Sidney and Aborigines give it away). Chapter 2 hops to a rundown house in Watertown—neither MA nor SD nor WI, but NY (which you’ll realize if you’re in the know enough to recognize that Watertown, NY is “off the road to Lowville”). You may be wondering, in the meantime, what the characters (and anything) in Chapter 2 have to do with Chapter 1. Chapter 3 hops to Stockbridge—neither GA nor MI, but MA (which you’ll realize if you’re in the know enough to recognize that Stockbridge, MA is “more than an hour away” from Albany, NY). You may be wondering what the characters in Chapter 3 have to do with 1 or 2 until you flip back to discover that a name dropped in 3 had indeed cropped up in 1.

Chapter 4 introduces a little more clarity: Julius from Chapter 3 “was not what you might expect him to be.” But he turns out, in fact, to be just what you “might expect him to be”: since he’s gay, he turns out also to be effete, insecure, insincere, duplicitous, disloyal, dissatisfied, a master of bitchy repartee, a sex addict, and (hmmmmmm) Asian. A few more chapters down the road, the reader will also confront the white, female author imagining the imaginings of the gay Asian before, during, and after he’s having stereotypical, wildly promiscuous and irresponsible sex. (Some sort of turnabout is fair play, perhaps, given all those complaints about male authors’ descriptions of female coital imaginings?)

Eventually, in Chapters 5 & 6, readers arrive in New York City, the only place that really matters for this collection of temporarily scattered characters, who reassemble and turn out to have long histories with one another: especially a trio of almost-30s, bright, entitled, doted upon by parents who didn’t have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get them into the best schools. But by 2001 none of them has yet quite made it. For another 300 pages we share what they are thinking about that state of affairs, what they think the others may be thinking about that state of affairs, and everybody’s thoughts on the various romantic affairs that entangle several of them. It’s a sortof archly satirical comedy of manners about and for those who believe the centers of culture end at the Hudson River. Other readers may feel that it exemplifies what the author is parodying and may find it hard to care.

I struggled determinedly through the first 200 pages, by which point I found myself hooked--curious to discover what would become of them all and, I admit, hoping for the worst. (Predictably, the only physical violence involved the gay guy.) Having read none of the literary kafuffle about the book, I was happily caught off guard by the deus ex machina that dropped in ¾ of the way through to shake things up. As we neared the end, I recognized what was coming, but remained curious to see how the author would handle it.

I’d acknowledge that it’s not a book I liked (slipping into another bout of Imposter’s Syndrome), but it’s one I find interesting to talk about.

On the cover of this book about people living in New York it says this book received the honor of "best book of the year" from the New York Times. Talk about navel contemplation, because I truly cannot understand why this book won any awards. The book is borderline horrid. It's as if each character is like the writer character in Sideways, so painful to watch that it's tempting to turn off the movie. Too much detail, too much wining, too much fuss about everything that takes away from the basic character development. It's an example of another good story idea that is ruined w/ way too much interal charcter dialogue. I want a story w/ a point or that gives me something to take away. New York is one of my favorite cities and this book gave the city a bad taste.
The real kicker is when at the very end 9/11 is brought into the story. Is that why the book was given an award - because it talked about the struggles of new yorkers post 9/11? All 70 pages out of 500?? And in comparison to the real horrors of that day - the stories told in this book are shameful in their absolute lack of reality and enormity. How can a city, at the core of that tragic event, acknowledge a book that is mocking in its attempt to explain that emotion, with such an award? The characters in the book were upset about an affair ending w/ a married man, their husband not acting like a newlywed, their magazine being cancelled, and the worst offense, taking advantage of all the horror to fake ones own death. It is completly disrespectful to those who had true horror on that day.
There are moments, outside of the 9/11 factor that she adds, where Messudit gets what it's like to feel like an island of a person and tells it truthfully. The rest, well it seemed like she was being paid by the word and not with the presentation of an actual novel.

I'm sure I wrote a review of this book. Not sure where it went. I read this book when it first came out one summer when staying at Harbin Hot Springs for the summer.
Read most of it outside under a tree each day.

I love this author .."The Woman Upstairs" is my favorite.

I liked this book.. however - my one problem with it .., was I felt the writing was MUCH more sophisticated than the story itself.
I must have looked up more vocabulary words in this book - than 10 other fiction books combined.

Anything Claire Writes is worth reading!