After finally finishing this book in an agonizing three days, I read the NYT book review on line to try to figure out why the NYT would consider this book is notable. Evidently, Massud is a "writer's writer" and the reviewer herself was a Brown graduate in her '30s.

Not being either a writer or a Brown graduate, and being in the later half of my 30's, nothing in this book grabbed or amused me, save, perhaps, the character of Julius. This is due in part to the forced use of "10 cent words" when others would do (and likely resonate more clearly as vocabulary used by well-educated 30s english majors living in Manhattan sponging off of their parents; not their 50-60 year old parents). Next, the narrator's voice overshadows the development of the characters to the point where each character had very limited depth (again, save Julius, however his depth was stereotypical disillusioned gay man in Manhattan unable to maintain a relationship having meaningless sex in odd places for the thrill of it). Lastly, the character of Ludo Seeley, who is presented as a villan is also never developed either as villainous or as an Australian (his lack of Australian-ness, or anything other than the same portrayal as the other characters was one of the more amusing points of the book). He's just as bland as the rest. There is nothing sympathetic about any of these characters; nor is there much to hate.

The overall effect is that the sentence structure, conversations, and language used by each character are simply implausible and frankly, not terribly insightful or interesting. The reactions and responses to the critical event in the last 20 pages or so are passingly interesting but definitely not worth the wait.

The characters in this novel are so self absorbed, so utterly boring and pretentious, that when Sept 11 happens they are shaken to the bone. And this is the point. Messud addresses a whole generation's cluelessness and navelgazing as the issue that it is. Brilliant.

3.5, only because she's such a strong writer and an observational genius.

I'm really over spoiled-rich-Manhattanite novels, though. Especially where old successful white men have affairs with young women.

Oh, and 9/11 is deployed. It goes OK. (Not 9/11, that sucked. I mean its narrative deployment.)

I can’t decide if this was a pretentious book about awful people or a book that missed the mark in mocking pretentious people. Either way, I find the literary raves baffling.

This is the first book for which I had read the Goodreads reviews beforehand and they are not very kind. I can see both sides of the fence. I see why people would like this book - the characters, although deplorable, are addicting. But is this worth a journey of hundreds of pages? I'm still not sure. I did feel the authors captured a sense of New York City (says the Minnesotan) but I often felt she was taking me as a reader for granted and not quite working hard enough to capture my full attention.

A modern Audubon...

What a smart book Claire Messud has written, capturing a variety of rare species from our contemporary metropolitan social aviary, vividly colored and in full flight, in memorable portraits. Having said as much, I'm not sure that The Emperor's Children (an eminently apt title) is as brilliant as its greatest admirers insist. I do know, however, that it's not as dismissibly inconsequential as its most ferocious detractors opine.

I suspect people in the book trade - familiars of the Media-Corridor midtown-Manhattan world of The Emperor's Children - will recognize Messud's dramatis personae as recognizable "types," denizens of New York's (and L.A.'s, and London's) culture factories. Messud's principals are vain, compulsively introspective, self-referential, nit-picking, underachieving yet overambitious - indeed, the curse of this class is the extent to which its reach exceeds its grasp - and, yes, narcissistic.

Here are our literary Gen Xers on the threshold of full adult plumage: Danielle, the bright bourgeois outsider, "inside" by virtue of an Ivy League education and its social advantages. Marina, exceptionally beautiful, conventionally bright, but intellectually unexceptional and, knowing it, insecure in the shadow of a celebrated father and the advantages that confers. Murray Thwaite, the celebrated father himself, who warbles counterpoint to the Gen Xers (in predictable "when-I-was-your-age" tones), representing all the self-congratulatory, dismissive Boomers. Bootie, Marina's dumpy cousin and Thwaite's nephew, an autodidact (or is it simply "avid reader" and "lazybones"?) attracted to New York City and the pure "life of the mind," driven to accomplish something "important " without being quite clear about what that might be. And Ludo, the Australian Tina-Brown manqué, bankrolled by a Rupert Murdoch simulacrum to found a literary journal, and apostle of a cultural "revolution" that may amount to little more than cheaply sensational polemics.

The narcissism Messud captures is reflected primariliy in her characters' determination to propagate their own "ideas," even when they're not certain just what those ideas might be. And this is very much a novel of ideas - ideas Messud knows and understands much better than her superficial characters. Hence the the implicit question, "if you don't love your own ideas, who will?" Surely this lies at the core of Ludovic Seely's enterprise, which he generalizes to the many who dream of being intellectual conquerors, "little Napoleons," each of whom wants only "to get everyone to see another way, his way, and then to make that way the standard. Then to have them - all of society's little Napoleons, all of us - under his sway." There's a little Ludo in a lot of us.

As much as I enjoyed The Emperor's Children, I have three sizable issues with it and thus dock it a star. Each of Messud's various characters share a gimlet eye: they are all similarly hyper-observant, and all describe - interiorly - their observations in similarly literary, metaphorical terms. This is Messud's own perceptiveness, bleeding across her cast of characters. And everyone obsesses over how they "seem" to others. Messud imparts to all her creatures the consciousness of one who has apparently worried - perhaps decades ago, perhaps still - a great deal about appearance, about how one is seen or taken by others.

And I was let down by the novel's conclusion. This is, famously, a novel of 9/11, and in various reactions to the events of that day we do or do not pick up additional information about Messud's characters. But I found each imagined life more interesting as a matrix of possibilities than, at novel's end, as realized outcomes or fates, where they seemed much less compelling. I kept thinking of a line from Updike's story, "The Bulgarian Poetess" - "reality is the progressive impoverishment of possibility." The novel is most exciting in the first half, when it is a bare universe of possibility. Messud is able to sustain that sense of "anything can happen" for some way, but the need for closure produces unsatisfying resolutions.

Finally, Bootie, the autodidact nephew, is hardly ever believable, and for me his fate is particularly unconvincing. On page 210, Danielle, with a secret to keep, observes that Bootie is "canny" and would sniff the mystery out. I think most readers will find this observation surprising, because Bootie - who, as the dust jacket informs us, makes the decisions that literally drive the narrative - is, in his public manifestations (as opposed to his interior, crypto-Messudian consciousness), far from canny: tongue-tied, inarticulate, sophomoric, even obtuse, if not barking mad (but without the loopy yet plausible logic of the madman: simply delusional).

Reservations aside, I recommend The Emperor's Children as a mirror to ourselves and our time, as an aviary of familiar favorite feathered friends, and as a handsomely wrought specimen of the contemporary literary comedy of manners.

A hundred pages in and boy does the prose grate against my brain. The moment an author sets a vocabulary bar as an elitist requirement to clear in order to be amongst the 'privileged' who shall be allowed to strut around spouting laurels about the work, I'm out. I'm so far out, running away and over those thousand adjectives, adverbs and other modifiers and justifiers that pepper a sentence between 'Murray' and 'walked in.' Nope, Murray has to wait for Messud to finish rambling on and on about the past and the present, the of courses and oh pleases, throw a dozen fancy words in and leave everyone generally wondering what the hell she's talking about before Murray can take one step further. I'm out, tata.

Yes, the characters are all rather unlikeable. But what makes this book so readable is the omniscient narrator, and the complexities of human observation, internal dialogue, vocabulary, and plot that kept me reading. Reminded me of some great 19th century novels' style and perspective. Enjoyed it.

I plowed my way through this with increasing disappointment. I debated mentioning that it is a 9/11 novel but, well, it's obvious in every comment about this book out there, and without mentioning 9/11 it is almost impossible to explain the low rating I'm giving it. The novel has flashes of good writing, sometimes a touch over-written, sometimes reliant on clichés. It unfolds around a small number of key characters, none of whom is designed to elicit much empathy, many of whom act at times inconsistently with their characters and opinions. The writing style and the sub-plots were at least strong enough to keep my attention. But then 9/11 happens, and all sub-plots are effectively abandoned. None of the characters behaves with any consistency post 9/11; the book just sort of peters out. I would mind less had this been a novella, but the writing style is far from sparse, it took 370 pages to get to the main event. In the end I am not convinced Messud had a lot to say about 9/11, I found myself wondering whether she actually set out to write about 9/11. If anything, the novel seems to be about the challenge of being a writer in a post 9/11 world, which might have been something the characters in the novel would have concerned themselves with, but the opportunity for introspection of this type is essentially overlooked.

Friends from college, on the cusp of 30, contemplate growing up, both personally and professionally. Vivid characters, sparkling dialogue, heart-rending interpersonal dramas--everything is very well drawn, and very New Yorky. Not a tremendous amount of plot, but the novel is amply pushed forward by the core tension of whether their relationships will hold.

DNF. This book is insufferable. The writing is pretentious and overwritten. I can’t bear to give another page of this book my time.

EDIT: Wow, truly do not remember even trying to read this five years ago, but having just finished it, I can say I haven't hated a book this vividly in a very long time! I FEEL ALIVE WITH VITRIOL!

Nope. Gave up. Grew less and less invested as I got deeper, which I don't think can be solely attributed to the fact that it is difficult these days for me to read anything but 1D fan fic.