Product Description

The Emperor’s Children is a richly drawn, brilliantly observed novel of fate and fortune—about the intersections in the lives of three friends, now on the cusp of their thirties, making their way--and not-- in New York City. In this tour de force, the celebrated author Claire Messud brings to life a city, a generation, and the way we live in this moment.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #203493 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-29
• Released on: 2006-08-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 448 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Marina Thwaite, Danielle Minkoff and Julian Clarke were buddies at Brown, certain that they would soon do something important in the world. But as all near 30, Danielle is struggling as a TV documentary maker, and Julius is barely surviving financially as a freelance critic. Marina, the startlingly beautiful daughter of celebrated social activist, journalist and hob-nobber Murray Thwaite, is living with her parents on the Upper West Side, unable to finish her book"titled The Emperor's Children Have No Clothes (on how changing fashions in children's clothes mirror changes in society). Two arrivals upset the group stasis: Ludovic, a fiercely ambitious Aussie who woos Marina to gain entrée into society (meanwhile planning to destroy Murray's reputation), and Murray's nephew, Frederick "Bootie" Tubb, an immature, idealistic college dropout and autodidact who is determined to live the life of a New York intellectual. The group orbits around the post"September 11 city with disconcerting entitlement"and around Murray, who is, in a sense, the emperor. Messud, in her fourth novel, remains wickedly observant of pretensions"intellectual, sexual, class and gender. Her writing is so fluid, and her plot so cleverly constructed, that events seem inevitable, yet the narrative is ultimately surprising and masterful as a contemporary comedy of manners. 100,00 announced first printing; author tour.(Sept. 4)
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From The New Yorker
In this witty examination of New York's chattering classes, which opens in the spring of 2001, the despot of the title is Murray Thwaite, a famous journalist who made his name in the Vietnam era. The next generation, however, is having trouble gaining traction. Murray's daughter, Marina, unable to complete a long-overdue book on the cultural significance of children's clothing, has moved back into her parents' Upper West Side apartment and is doing a lot of yoga. Her two best friends—Danielle, a television producer, and Julius, a gay freelance critic—are similarly ambitious and entitled, without being particularly driven. All three find sex the easiest way to transform themselves. Only Murray's brainy and profoundly disenfranchised nephew from upstate aggressively pursues his belief in the true and the good, but he proves to be a sort of literary terrorist, threatening to blow the family apart. The humorous intimacies of Messud's portraits do not, finally, soften the judgments behind them: If this is what's become of the liberal imagination, is it worth fighting for?
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From The Washington Post
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.

Reviewed by Ron Charles
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

The Emperor's Children Have No Clothes!
Since many reviewers have discussed the story line in detail, I will stick with my overall impressions of what I consider an extremely over hyped disappointing read.

In my opinion, none of the main characters are anywhere near as adorable as the author keeps insisting they are. Their most notable characteristic is a non-stop (and rather interchangeable) flow of campy repartee that might convey intellect, success, pretension, heartbreak, or whatever to someone steeped in their milieu but which kept me at a considerable emotional distance. The doomed idol, Murray Thwaite, in particular is dreadfully flimsy - is this the author's dream of an articulate, handsome, talented, unattainable (for others who wish to be him) Golden Boy. This sort of wish fulfillment at the reader's expense is simply unpalatable to the serious consumer. And, if this was to be a tongue in cheek attempt at humor, it fell far short of the mark.

I agree with other reviewers. It appears the author likes very long sentences; many paragraphs are absolutely incomprehensible. Are we to be impressed with the overuse of commas and dependent clauses so that it often takes two or three readings to render a sentence understandable? If this is the new era of grown-up writing, I'll stick to my mysteries and nonfiction.

But, I kept at it hoping that Messud would indeed pull it off in the end; however, the ending too was quite unsatisfactory. And, the use of the 9/11 tragedy to try to wrap it up is unforgivable. If so many New Yorkers of this age group truly were so wrapped in their own petty self-absorptions during this time period, God save our country. Could any of the characters see outside their own small contrived world? It would appear not. I won't be reading any more of Messud's work.

If you're hoping for a plot, forget it. You can just read a page and sit back and admire Messud's gift for metaphor, prose and description. But plot and character development are as thin as deli cheese and just about as smelly. It's sadly true, but all of these characters stink, for one reason or another.

Do yourself a favor, don't buy the book. If you've read the hype and still think it's worth it, check it out from a library or borrow a copy. In fact, let me know, I'll send you mine. The only thing it's good for is keeping coffee rings off my desk.

a good book not without a fault
"The Emperor's Children" were recommended to me by several people, I was also very encouraged by the reviews. Maybe because of my high expectations I was a bit disappointed after having read this novel. I guess I thought that it would be an absolute masterpiece, that it would leave me breathless. Nothing of that sort.
However, I do think that Claire Messud wrote a very decent book. First of all, it is extremely engrossing and it is hard to stop reading before the end. I am not sure if this is a characteristic of a great novel, but it is certainly positive.

The book starts very slowly and continues at a rather slow pace - important events come without being specially stressed or prepared. The structure of the novel adds to this impression - it is narrated month by month, throughout 2001, skipping some days and stretching the others.

There are only a few, meticulously described characters and the (long) beginning of the book is devoted mainly to development of their psychological portraits. We start with meeting Danielle, a TV reporter (well, more or less everyone here, with a few exceptions, works or wants to work in journalism, perhaps in a broad sense of the word), who spends her last night at a party in Australia, where she was gathering material to the TV program. Before flying home, she meets fascinating Ludovic Seeley, an Australian, who is going to start a new magazine, called "The Monitor" in New York City.

The other main characters are Julius, a gay writer with a lot of love problems, and Marina, a beautiful, spoiled daughter of a famous journalist, Murray Thwaite.
Danielle, Marina and Julius are all thirty, friends from college (Brown), and live in New York City, which is the setting of this novel. Otherwise, they are very different. Danielle, a daughter of divorced parents from Ohio, is a perfectionist, who treats life and her career seriously, her goals are precise, but she also dreams of a perfect love (which, obviously, predestines her for a failure in this field). Julius, a son of a Vietnam veteran and his wife brought from the war, is also dreaming of love, career and being a socialite, which seems to be unattainable, because of the contradictions in his own personality. Marina, who seems not to have grown up (probably because of being in the shadow of her father and, at the same time, being overprotected by her rich, sophisticated parents, is supposed to write a book about children's clothes and is stuck. Until, through Danielle, she meets Ludovic. Then she moves on with the book, but gets stuck in other ways in her life...

The other crucial character is Frederic, a.k.a. Bootie, a nephew of Murray Thwaite, who lives with his mother in Watertown, upstate NY, and dropped out of college because of his disgust for hypocrisy of students and incompetence of teachers. He is generally disappointed with people, and wants to educate himself. He decides to go to New York and get advice from Murray, his idol.

I was surprised by the 9/11 events appearing here (again) but they are shown at a special angle although it was exploited, to a varying extent, by many authors, very well, for example, by Ian McEwan in "Saturday" (and to be exploited for many years to come, I am sure). Messud used it to show the selfishness of her characters, their own petty concerns, their worries at that time, and. At the end, I was quite interested in the light she gave to that day. Especially for Bootie, 9/11 was a special day...

Long sentences? Please... I think only American readers can complain about this. Complexity of the prose has never made books popular bestsellers, I am sure (look at Faulkner, Joyce, Proust, or closer, at Pynchon for example - I am not saying that Messud compares to any of them, but certainly the length of sentences is not a problem here). Maybe it is true, what has been said of this book, that it would be praised by the critics, but not by the readers... For me, the problem is rather the ending and generally the development of the plot. The characters I did not see as created to be likeable, they seem to be rather caricatures, personalize certain stereotypes, at the same time not lacking in perfectly human, individual duplicity (especially Murray Thwaite, as a two-faced role model, or Bootie, a ridiculous contemporary rebel), although, I have to admit, the style of writing is such as it is not obvious if the narrator (author?) admires snobbery to some extent, or all of it is a satire on American lifestyles.

Generally, this is a good book. It reads well, and it makes one think. It just lacks depth in the plot, and disappointed me a bit, as I said at the beginning, most likely because I expected too much. And, of course, it means I agree with other reviewers that it is overhyped. But it does not mean it lacks value or should be condemned.

Claire Messud's "The Emperor's Children"
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. Twaite 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 Twaite's draft and unpublished manuscript and on his observations of Thaite'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 Amazon 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 Amazon 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 secularity in the book, Messud explores an issue that remains troubling to many people.

The second factor that Messud explores with some subtelty 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.

This is not a pretty or an easy book. But in the issues it explores it is thoughtful. Readers who are interested in sharper satrical 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