Thoughts in order:
1. I need a dictionary.
2. Maybe a book with so many semicolons isn't for someone with pandemic brain.
3: wait, it is a September 11th book? Didn't see that coming. Tidy ending that was definitely the best part of the work but a slog to get to.

I couldn’t read it.

Marvelous read featuring a New York male writer/essayist who pronounces on modern life, valuing integrity above all. Everyone in his circle revolve around him. His lack of awareness of his own behaviour is breathtaking. it's a spell binding book of secrets upon secrets featuring a narcissist of the highest order.

I love her clever lines:
P49 "...his thick thighs in their chinos like extra pieces of furniture protuding into the room."

P50 on a super masculine father who adores his gay son unaware of how he looked when with him: "like his son's suburban John, a married sugar daddy, getting a bit of boy on the side" when they went out in New York together.

P5"He was aware that at thirty he stretched the limits of the charming wastrel."

And more like this.

I couldnt finish it. While the characters were pretentious, they werent affected enough to make me necessarily want to stop reading. I think it just meandered too much for me. AND THEN, when I heard a 911 event was going to intersect this novel, I decided I'd had enough. I just felt like moving on to something else.

BUT WHO IS THE EMPEROR????

Completely up my alley. Most of this novel glitters with the same love for sophisticated urban life that you can find in Balzac; Messud doesn’t give us a fantasy, Dickensian New York but instead something more textured, more complex, far bitchier. It’s a joy to be in her rendering of the world. Everything is dry and droll and suffused with precocious wisdom (lots of folk, nuggets of god-honest).

I adore Messud’s phrasing, the way her sentences are like waves that roll back and forth in the shallows, before they wash over you. God grant me the confidence to wield commas and sling em dashes like Claire Messud.

And then the wallop comes, of course, inexorable but gutting still. She pulls it off, more or less. It feels like the right end, for that moment at least. Reading it now, you look back at the gulping maw of everything that’s happened since and it doesn’t feel so nice, that peculiar literary melancholy. But we trod on, I suppose.

(My giddiness for this novel aside — warranting the full, rare-ish cinco de staros — I have some quibbles. I’ll only dwell here on one: I struggled with Julius’ place in the novel until the very end; structurally, his purpose seemed clearer, but for most of the novel Julius feels just too isolated. Maybe he’s a glittering, gay Levin, fittingly in a whole other story from Pierre and Natasha.)

(((PPS: Annabel is a darling and we should all strive to be Annabels is this world of Murrays and Ludos.)))

A book equivalent of "that could have been an email".

I've found the one character that I have despised because of his stupidity/naiveness, whatever you want to call it: Bootie Tubb. I think he was the worst character out of all of them! I think Jill put it right when she mentioned this book was like reading about the 7 deadly sins. These people just seem so caught up in their own lives, and claimed to be friends and care about each other, but that was hardly the truth. I had a hard time getting through the first half of the book, but loved the second half. If you love to hate characters, you need to read this book.

The Emperor's children is a novel about a small group of New Yorkers. It took me a while to get into it. At first, I wondered what all the hype was about. But while characters are eccentric, they became real to me as I continued to read. The plot is relatively simple but I found it increasingly difficult to put down. Claire Messud is a very effective writer. This book is clearly going to be most appealing to people who are familiar with the cultural scene in New York.

I can't say enough bad things about this book. Annoying characters who whimper about what to do with themselves because they're so rich. Offensive gay stereotypes. Unresolved plots. This book has it all! Who doesn't want to read hundreds of pages of room and furniture descriptions? Yum yum. Worst of all, this book takes total advantage of 9/11. Rather than being distressed or sad about the attacks or using the opportunity to re-evaluate their lives, the characters in Messud's novel only care about how they can benefit. Bootie uses the attacks to run away. Danielle uses them to cover her grief over her lost lover. Murray revitalizes his career and doesn't have to tell his wife he was cheating. So because of 9/11, everything works out for these folks. Isn't that just swell?

Don't ever, ever, ever crack open the pages of this text.

Took me a while to get into the story, but once I did, couldn't put it down. It's brilliantly written and even if there are not too many interesting things happening, Messud somehow succeed to make the people interesting . . . almost in a creepy way. And I think Booty is my new hero!!!
I read Messud's "The Woman Upstairs", and loved it too.
She might be a new favourite!!

Picked this up at a thrift store, and it was worth the $1.50 I paid for it, but no more. Painfully overwritten, didactically slow. One of those books that thought it would be topical and timely by including the events of 9/11, but instead feels dated and overwrought because of it. I finished it because I thought I had to. Now not sure why I did. I wanted to like it more than I ended up thinking of it. Over and forgotten.

read 150 pgs of this before bailing so i feel qualified to say: