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.