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The Emperor's Children

Claire Messud

2.96 · Rating details · 20,272 ratings · 2,926 reviews

From a writer “of near-miraculous perfection” (The New York Times Book Review) and “a literary intelligence far surpassing most other writers of her generation” (San Francisco Chronicle), The Emperor’s Children is a dazzling, masterful novel 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. ...more

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Hardcover, First Edition, 431 pages

Published September 4th 2006 by Alfred A. Knopf (first published August 29th 2006)

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Aug 14, 2007 Mark Desrosiers rated it did not like it

Shelves: overrated-drivel, did-not-make-it-past-page-25

I only read about eight pages, a stately procession of blindingly obvious sentences with laser-pointers and strobelights and migraines between every fooking vowel and consonant, but I don't need to read any more. This is exactly the sort of prose that should be excised from these mass NYC-wuss fiction rollouts. For example (skipping forward to page 27):

The insouciance, of course, masked endless and wearisome neuroses, to which Marina and Danielle were privy.

"Of course" -- what kind of sadistic w ...more

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Jul 09, 2008 Eric rated it did not like it

1.) There's the grand old man of letters, Murray Thwaite, and the erotic charge in his relationship with his beautiful, adoring daughter Marina, who begins a relationship with and eventually marries Ludovic, an editor and a rising young Turk among the 'chattering classes,' a man Murray despises and who despises Murray in turn. Messud begins to weave a Jamesian tale in which Murray and Ludovic, monsters of egotism, vie for control of the affections of the passive, childlike Marina...but then she
1.) There's the grand old man of letters, Murray Thwaite, and the erotic charge in his relationship with his beautiful, adoring daughter Marina, who begins a relationship with and eventually marries Ludovic, an editor and a rising young Turk among the 'chattering classes,' a man Murray despises and who despises Murray in turn. Messud begins to weave a Jamesian tale in which Murray and Ludovic, monsters of egotism, vie for control of the affections of the passive, childlike Marina...but then she drops that storyline entirely.

2.) Then there's Frederick/Bootie, Murray's nephew, a slovenly, awkward, slightly creepy but intelligent and well-read drifting college dropout who shows up in New York and is taken in by Murray, and employed as his secretary. Bootie idolizes Murray. This isn't really believable, because someone of Bootie's reading and standards probably wouldn't mistake Murray--a 'thoughtful columnist,' a mere journalist, barely an intellectual, certainly no sage--for the second coming of Emerson. But whatever. Bootie is soon disillusioned with Murray, and does something really, wonderfully nasty: he happens upon Murray's secret manuscript, a work of philosophy that Murray cherishes as the key to his literary immortality, and writes a damning expose of Murray's pretensions and limitations, with of course generous quotations from the manuscript. He sends the article to Ludovic, who sits on it, but idly considers publishing it in the new magazine he's planning, much to the fury of Murray and the mixed feelings of Marina, who's just then mad at her dad for advising her not publish her first book. This Bootie subplot, though seriously flawed by Messud's inability to make Bootie at all alive, would have nicely dovetailed with the Murray-Ludovic-Marina triangle, but, again, Messud drops the thread completely. It just goes away. Murray fires Bootie and the boy slinks off to Fort Greene.

So yeah, the only storylines Messud choses to develop throughout the novel are 1.) the self-destructive antics of Julius, a promiscuous, sarcastic, coke-snorting gay man straight from Central Casting, and 2.) the affair Marina's best friend, Danielle, starts with Murray, after Marina gets with Ludovic, who Danielle at first thought liked her. This is the least interesting of all the subplots, and the vehicle for a lot of mawkish indirect discourse when we're in Danielle's head. Danielle is flat and boring, the character who is, after Bootie, the least able to carry the book. And soon all hope is lost when 9/11 happens. I groaned when I recalled, 80 pages from the end, that this was a 9/11 novel. Fuck. Clio, Muse of History, appears on stage in all her berobed, personified glory, and all hope for any saving dramatic development is vanquished. How lazy, how jejune. The characters, already stalled, then begin wringing their hands about how the world has changed forever.

I can't really convey how disappointing this book is. (I do feel iffy about giving it just one star and shelving it with 'crap,' because there are some very fine things here...but I'm going to be stern: a novel should be judged as a novel, as a structure, not as a sheaf of incidental beauties.) Messud abandons all of her Jamesian deftness of plotting and Wharton-like lofty irony for some really dull ruminations, clunky coincidences, and automatic and utterly undistinguished prose. And I was completely puzzled by the shift to Bootie at the end. He flees New York--everyone thinks he died when the towers fell, he was temping nearby--and hides out in Miami, and the book ends with his plan to reemerge someday and "take them by surprise." Huh? Huh? Bootie is, as a character, the greatest failure in the book, the most obvious sign of Messud's limitations as a writer (and if you can't construct a believable Brooding Young Male, you might as well get out of the game; even if you can't fully imagine him, the ground is thick with precedents from which to model such a character). Even when he's betraying Murray, he's so vague and lifeless. He's hardly on the page as an incidental figure, let alone a subtly nasty Jamesian villain or brooding Dostoevskian fireband. Why is he the portentous spirit presiding over the finale? Doesn't make sense. Perhaps this is what I get for taking a chance on a bestseller. What dreary shit. ...more

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Sep 20, 2007 Lee added it

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 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. ...more

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Jun 03, 2008 Tina rated it did not like it

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

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Jan 14, 2008 Stacey rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: um, no one!

Shelves: gag-me-with-a-spoon, bookclub-gems

I have less than 100 pages left in this one, but don't foresee the end changing my opinion.

I hated this book. Hated. I must not be smart enough to "get it", since I didn't go to Brown and all. But really, (can you not put entire sentences in parenthesis) within your other run-on, (never ending sentences?? Please??). I mean seriously, get an editor...save us 300 pages. I felt the need to consult a dictionary every other page, but really just didn't care that much to understand what EXACTLY, SPECI ...more

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Apr 03, 2018 Sara (sarawithoutanH) rated it did not like it

Shelves: 2018

This is one of the laziest and most obnoxiously pretentious books I’ve ever read. The characters were flat and uninteresting (and very annoying). I don’t know about you, but I’m a little tired of reading about uppity privileged white people. There’s nothing special about this book. The only character that was of some interest was Julius, but he was painfully overwritten and characterized as the typical “flamboyant gay man in NYC.” I believe he was Asian (I’m not sure Messud even takes the time t This is one of the laziest and most obnoxiously pretentious books I’ve ever read. The characters were flat and uninteresting (and very annoying). I don’t know about you, but I’m a little tired of reading about uppity privileged white people. There’s nothing special about this book. The only character that was of some interest was Julius, but he was painfully overwritten and characterized as the typical “flamboyant gay man in NYC.” I believe he was Asian (I’m not sure Messud even takes the time to describe his origin fully), but his race felt like just a random detail thrown in and not actual representation.

Literally nothing of note happens throughout this whole goddamn 431 page book. The characters just flit from one thing to the next with no real intrigue. I guess you could argue that stuff DOES happen, but what I’m trying to say is that it is BORING. And one of the most annoying things about this book is that in the last 50 pages it suddenly becomes a 9/11 book. I find that insanely lazy and a gross misuse of a tragedy. Not only is 9/11 randomly thrown in, but none of the character plots are finished. Like, 9/11 happens and everyone is like “wow, life” and then it’s over. wtf???

The writing is unbearably verbose. It’s like Messud is trying desperately to prove that her English degree from Brown is so0o0o0o useful. I’m glad I listened to the audiobook because the writing is made up of endless run-on sentences that I think would be pretty hard to physically read. It’s like Messud wants you to feel dumb for not memorizing the dictionary. Here’s an example of a sentence that I found in someone else’s review (thank you, Ewurama):

“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.”

Like, what the actual fuck are you trying to say???? I’m just wondering where the editor was when this book was getting published.

This book was also pretty fat phobic. There’s a character named Bootie (this name alone enrages me; it is SO DUMB) who is described as overweight. Every chance Messud gets, she brings this up. The other characters insult Bootie for being fat, as if being fat is the worst thing that a person could be. Messud is pretty clear about how she feels about being fat by how constantly she brings up descriptions of Bootie being sweaty and large. She doesn’t just leave it at him being fat either, she also hits us over the head with the fact that he is also awkward and has a creepy crush on his cousin (!?!?). He’s described as being sloppy and dirty and someone who no one likes. The treatment of this character irks me to no end.

There was also a few times that I was uncomfortable with how Messud treated characters that were minorities. There’s one black character that she describes in a very weird and troublesome way. I wish I had a copy of the book so I can find the quote exactly, but it was something along the lines of describing his skin as being “midnight” and “not American black, but a black from deep in Africa.” Like, I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean, but it made me feel weird. She also repeatedly uses the word “f*ggot” (I don’t mean to repeat it, which is why I’ve attempted to censor it). It’s almost always used by Julius, who is gay, but it still felt like she was appropriating a word that was not hers to use. The book is not told in first person so there are a few times that it’s in the narrative, which just felt wrong.

So, overall, don’t read this book. It’s not good. ...more

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Aug 28, 2017 Matt rated it liked it

Shelves: 9-11, contemporary-fiction

“Entitlement,” said Danielle. “It’s about a sense of entitlement.”

Pretty much sums up the book.

Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children is a very familiar story. As soon as you start reading it, you get the sense that you’ve been here before. The setting (New York City, where roughly 64% of all novels take place*) and the characters (over-educated and entitled young people) have been done before. What sets The Emperor’s Children apart is a bit subtle. For one, the young people aren’t that young, ...more

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Jul 03, 2007 David rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: hideously-vile-protagonists

I found "The Emperor's Children" incredibly disappointing. The reviews I had read just raved and raved, but I disliked it intensely. Shallow, solipsistic characters about whom I couldn't even bring myself to care - neither could the author apparently, as some were nothing more than lazy ciphers - the guy from Australia, Julius's boyfriend, the wife. Good God, if you are going to stoop to the jaded device of bringing in an alienated outsider to stir things up, please take the time at least to dev ...more

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Jul 02, 2007 Ewurama rated it it was ok · review of another edition

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. 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.
...more

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Mar 06, 2013 Elyse Walters rated it really liked it

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.

A ...more

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Jul 16, 2007 Rebekah rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: New Yorkers, people who see entitlement as a problem

My personal bible- the Sunday New York Times Book Review- claimed that this novel was the best of the year, the first to tackle the issues of the current 30-something generation, the first to directly deal with September 11 in fiction form and basically brilliant. I went into this book with high expectations and was not disappointed.

The characters in this novel are all superbly drawn and voiced, each seems like a separate, distinct being with individual loves, fears, insecurities, desires and ab My personal bible- the Sunday New York Times Book Review- claimed that this novel was the best of the year, the first to tackle the issues of the current 30-something generation, the first to directly deal with September 11 in fiction form and basically brilliant. I went into this book with high expectations and was not disappointed.

The characters in this novel are all superbly drawn and voiced, each seems like a separate, distinct being with individual loves, fears, insecurities, desires and above all, disappointments. Early on in the book, it becomes apparent that in New York City, if you haven't made it big, or at least made a splash in the learned, academic/journalistic world, by the age of 30, you likely never will and thus, your life is over. The three friends that the story centers around graduated from Brown and moved to the city, only to flounder their way for the next eight years. Julius, a fabulously gay man from Michigan, once made a splash by writing book reviews, but is now the "house wife" of a rich businessman from Scarsdale. Marina, daughter of a famous reporter and literary writer, has been working on a book about the reflection of culture on children's clothing (a book from which the novel takes its title) for the past eight years, a book that no one, not her friends or her family, ever think will be finished. Danielle, a producer in television, has her story ideas about cultural revolutions or the Australian aborigines shot down so often, she finally relents and pitches a story about botched liposuction, just to get on the air. Members of Marina's family, including her famous father, lawyer mother and younger cousin and a rich magazine publisher round out the cast of characters.

This novel could easily be held up against Jane Austin's as a lesson in the evolution of irony over the centuries. Messud's wit is bitter at times, sharp at others, but if you read virtually any chapter again, there is room for a sarcastic and ironic view of what the characters are thinking. Each character has the capacity to be at once selfish and utterly selfless, or to show generosity and greed in the breath.

Messud's picture of New York City, both before and after September 11, is accurate, both impressive and slightly seedy. As the actual events of September 11 unfold, unexpected and yet brilliantly folded into the plot and resolution of the novel, one experiences this tragedy though the eyes of the characters, each reaction different from the others, yet each unbelievable poignant and utterly effecting. ...more

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Sep 22, 2017 Chrissie rated it did not like it

Shelves: audible-uk, returned, disliked, relationships, fiction, 2017-read, usa, love, lgtb, life-stages

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 terribl 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. ...more

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Aug 20, 2007 L rated it it was ok

Recommends it for: Brown graduates in their early 30s living in Manhattan

Shelves: over-rated

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 o ...more

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Jan 08, 2022 Hugh rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: booker-longlist, read-2022, modern-lit

The last of my batch from the 2006 Booker longlist, and probably the least impressive.

Not that it is bad - it is quite well written, but I had very little sympathy for any of the characters (view spoiler). I have also read far too many books about young New Yorkers.

It is also far too long for a book w ...more

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Oct 10, 2008 Katherine rated it liked it

Recommends it for: striving new york city thirty-pushers, of course.

Recommended to Katherine by: Alison Sharpe

Shelves: newer-fiction

This book came in for a drubbing from the Goodreads community that was very much at odds with the fulsome praise on its back cover. Where I shall I situate myself on this continuum of blame to praise?

At over 400 pages, The Emperor's Children is long, but I raced through it, inhaling sections like I've been known to do with big bowls of salty, buttery popcorn. This may have something to do with where I'm at, right now -- craving the kind of escape that narrative provides -- but it's also a testam This book came in for a drubbing from the Goodreads community that was very much at odds with the fulsome praise on its back cover. Where I shall I situate myself on this continuum of blame to praise?

At over 400 pages, The Emperor's Children is long, but I raced through it, inhaling sections like I've been known to do with big bowls of salty, buttery popcorn. This may have something to do with where I'm at, right now -- craving the kind of escape that narrative provides -- but it's also a testament to the author's knack for pacing. It's a long book made up of very short chapters, and I got addicted to running from porthole to porthole, peering in at the characters and plot-lines in quick succession. I stayed up way past my bedtime last night, to finish.

I think The Emperor's Children is trying to be an old-fashioned novel (the dust-cover praise mentions Wharton, Fitzgerald, and Waugh) about new times and new things. I think that's an interesting goal, in these subjectivity-obsessed times of ours. The narrator is omniscient and removed but all-seeing. The characters span a (fairly) wide range of ages and social backgrounds. The author strives for a timeless, stately tone, too. Most of the time she succeeds. Somebody already pointed out her Jamesian long sentences. Usually it's lovely. She likes to avoid split infinitives by putting the adjective before the infinitive rather than after it ("boldly to go," "naturally to finish"), which sounds a little high-flown, but it works with it.

About a third of the way in, I found myself wondering how we are meant to take the characters in this book, as in, how seriously, and how we are to judge them, because there does seem to be an invitation to judgment. (It is, after all, a novel of manners. That's what we're supposed to do with them, right?) Some of the reviewers seem inclined to write the book off because they deem the characters to be shallow, but I think that some degree of shallowness, or hypocrisy, was the point. Actually, I'd like to get into this conversation with someone...is the book supposed to be an indictment of the people in it, or the world it portrays? What's 9/11 doing at the end, anyway, besides being climactic?

In the end, I think I enjoyed the novel more as a fast-moving story and as a very vivid collection of details from disparate worlds than I did as a commentary on social life or a portrait of inner life, if that makes sense. Even though some of the characters failed to inspire my sympathy at times, I continued to be curious about what was going to happen to them next. More than anything else, what struck me was Claire Messud's facility with details. We get the minutest descriptions of the inside of a grubby shared college house, right down to the slimy chain you have to plunge your hand into the tank to retrieve before flushing, and then the precise contents of the fridge at an Upper West Side apartment facing the Park, then the exact books and CDs on the shelves of a 30-year-old working woman's studio. For every detail that seemed a little bit off, and there were a few that I was inclined to cavil at because they don't match MY reality, there were a handful of others that made me think, 'my god! She's not supposed to KNOW this stuff!'

In any case, I'll doubtless think about this book often if only because the building where the character Danielle Minkoff, the book's moral center, was supposed to have lived really exists, and is clearly visible from the corner where I catch the subway to come home from work.

Writers about New York City have a peculiar advantage and disadvantage that way, it seems. There are a lot of eyes in this city, and while everybody likes reading about something they have a personal experience of, everybody's quick to jump on the person who gets it even a little bit wrong. I'm a New Yorker (five-ish years here?) and nearing 30 and while I don't feel that Marina's, Julius's, or even Danielle's world maps perfectly onto mine, it'd be churlish not to admit that there are a few points of contact, or that reading about the familiar/unfamiliar world these characters inhabit isn't good fun.

...more

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Jul 10, 2007 Jennifer rated it did not like it

Recommends it for: no one

There are several things that I did not like about this book. For starters, the writing style and language used was rather arrogant, pompous, and supercilious. Do you get my point? She used multiple adjectives that mean the same thing and also used words that sound like they were straight out of Dawson's Creek. NO ONE talks like that! I think she may have spent more time looking up fancier ways to phrase things rather than on the plot.

I didn't like this book from the beginning and it killed me ...more

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Jan 03, 2014 Ron Charles rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 9-11

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 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.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/... ...more

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Jul 23, 2016 Chris Dietzel rated it did not like it

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

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Feb 05, 2008 Yulia rated it it was amazing

Shelves: writers-on-writing

This is my generation, what can I say? Educated in the best of institutions, overburdened by self-analysis, underemployed, wondering what it will all lead to after our parents have cut the umbilical cord finally. How could it not resonate?

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Apr 28, 2011 aPriL does feral sometimes rated it did not like it

Shelves: literary

Undermining my enjoyment of 'The Emperor's Children' by Claire Messud was the upper class lifestyle. The denouement of the book failed to conquer the twitch in my lip threatening to become a sneer. These people had great opportunities with which they played stupidly. It all ended up feeling like they flipped out over petty and small worries. My bad, I suppose.

EDIT: January, 2021

Changed stars rating.... ...more

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Feb 28, 2018 Patricia Williams rated it liked it

I had wanted to read this book for a long time and chose it for my book club. This was a very hard book to read, very hard to care about the characters but it took me over 1/2 through the book to start to be interested in the characters. This book had a lot of words on a page and a lot of "big" words. The story in relation to the title was very interesting and I've read this is being made into a movie which was another reason i wanted to read it and I'm sure it will be a good movie. All the char ...more

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Apr 08, 2020 robin friedman rated it really liked it

Claire Messud's "The Emperor's Children"

Claire 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 Claire Messud's "The Emperor's Children"

Claire 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. Thwaite 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 Thwaite's draft and unpublished manuscript and on his observations of Thwaite'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 online 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 online 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 secularism in the book, Messud explores an issue that remains troubling to many people.

The second factor that Messud explores with some subtlety 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.

"The Emperor's Children" is not a pretty or an easy book. But in the issues it explores it is thoughtful. Readers who are interested in sharper satirical 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 ...more

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Feb 17, 2010 Marc Kozak rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction-from-the-2000s

EVERYONE IN NEW YORK HAS SEX WITH EACH OTHER.

Also, this is an actual sentence:

"But for right now, on the Sunday evening the week after the wedding, it just felt as though she were married not to a man but to The Monitor; or rather, that she was not married at all, because it was after nine p.m. and she had packed in hours ago - the issue in all its glory wouldn't be sent to the printer until Tuesday night and her part was done, for this first time at least, and the pieces for her section in the ...more

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Nov 25, 2007 Laura rated it it was ok

A last minute, impulsive buy at the airport, en route to France, that I thought I remembered reading really good things about. I read it on the plane, I read it in hotels, I read it on the train. At first, I thought, "she writes well and this is good." I have children younger than those in the book, so was interested in the fates and trajectories of her characters, even though several of them were pretty unlikeable. The more I read, the more I kept waiting for the good parts. By the time it ende ...more

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Jun 26, 2020 M.M. Strawberry Library & Reviews rated it it was ok

Shelves: did-not-finish, 21st-century, north-america

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 stil ...more

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Jun 15, 2008 Galen Johnson rated it did not like it · review of another edition

This book follows three Brown graduates at that crossroads of turning 30, trying to reach their potential and somewhat confused about why they haven't. SO disappointing that there wasn't much insight associated with this book...I was really looking forward to reading it, being a Brown graduate who just dealt with reaching my 30s and having read fantastic reviews of the book. Aside: Why did Messud have to pick on Brown??? There are shallow failures from every school. Okay, enough personal complai This book follows three Brown graduates at that crossroads of turning 30, trying to reach their potential and somewhat confused about why they haven't. SO disappointing that there wasn't much insight associated with this book...I was really looking forward to reading it, being a Brown graduate who just dealt with reaching my 30s and having read fantastic reviews of the book. Aside: Why did Messud have to pick on Brown??? There are shallow failures from every school. Okay, enough personal complaining.
I found the writing to be good, but it didn't sweep me away. The characters were boring, obsessed with themselves and their ideas, but not so much with others. They see their function as contributing their ideas, rather than their energy or labor, to society, which might be alright if their ideas were more useful. If Messud's goal was a satire of self-important Ivy-Leaguers, she was effective, but I got the impression that she really thought she had developed meaningful characters that people could learn from. Hmmm.
I was somewhat disappointed in how Messud used September 11 in her book--it is interesting to see how authors are approaching this (kind of interested in one reviewer's dissertation). I felt like she used it as a further excuse for her characters to do nothing, rather than as a real turning point for any of them. Again, being in the age group, a graduate of Brown, and thus acquainted with many people this age who are Ivy League graduates, I found these characters to be a poor representation--I think many people this age, of whatever background, are much more self-possessed, self-motivated, and more conscious of their role in society than these characters, most of whom I would probably actively avoid at parties. Most people learn from their introspection and from those around them, something these characters didn't master. If this was meant to be a satire, it fell short, and if it was meant to be an actual examination of these characters, if fell incredibly short.

I might be forgetting some details of the book, because I traded it at the used book store almost immediately upon completion, but my overall impression of this entire book was failure: failure of the characters to realize that WORK is required to reach goals, even if you are smart and well-educated, failure of the writer to differentiate among types of failure among the characters, failure of the writing to move beyond good to amazing. Perhaps most mysteriously, failure of the NYT book review to properly categorize this book as half-rate chick-lit.
...more

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Mar 03, 2018 Charlotte Guzman rated it liked it

Ok, I am giving this book 2 1/2 stars.
Ugh! This book was picked for my ladies book club and I really wanted to like it but ended up not caring for it at all.
The story about 3 to 4 thirty something people who had no idea what they wanted in life. They had the opportunity to do something in life but seemed to be in angst as to what to do to fulfill this endeavor.
The author wrote with such high brow words and way too many adjectives to describe the characters and their situations. Didn't care fo ...more

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Aug 22, 2007 Matthew rated it liked it · review of another edition

It's no secret how The Emperor's Children will end. Claire Messud's novel follows a group of New Yorkers, all connected in some way, during the summer and fall of 2001, culminating with the terrorist attacks of September 11. The tragedy is unavoidable and, for the reader, completely foreseen. But this isn't a book about September 11. Messud doesn't rely on or construct her story around the impending disaster like, say, something like Titanic does. What's important here is not that the tragedy oc It's no secret how The Emperor's Children will end. Claire Messud's novel follows a group of New Yorkers, all connected in some way, during the summer and fall of 2001, culminating with the terrorist attacks of September 11. The tragedy is unavoidable and, for the reader, completely foreseen. But this isn't a book about September 11. Messud doesn't rely on or construct her story around the impending disaster like, say, something like Titanic does. What's important here is not that the tragedy occurs, but how it changes the characters, how it suddenly reveals who they really are, and how it echoes some of the novel's main themes, particularly this: You are not as important or invulnerable as you think you are.

Three ambitious, idealistic friends from college (Marina, Danielle, and Julius) are now thirty years old, struggling with the creeping doubt that their lives are destined to be ordinary after all. Marina's pretending to write a book for which she's already spent her entire advance. Danielle's a television producer, frustrated at having to curb her abstract ideas for higher ratings. Julius, after a successful stint as a cultural critic, now merely plays at being in the "it crowd." To make matters worse, they all live under the long shadow of Murray Thwaite, Marina's father, a wildly popular journalist and social activist, who is similarly, and secretly, lost.

As much a novel about growing up as it is about the illusions of power, The Emperor's Children alternates between each character, giving the reader glances of their insecurities and fears. When Messud introduces two other people to this world, things go slowly awry. With long, fluid sentences, she describes these polite betrayals and social hypocrisy beautifully, but Messud's characters are not nearly as captivating and charismatic as she wants them to be, and we're stuck inside their rambling thoughts, which are often repetitive. It's not that The Emperor's Children has no clothes, it's just that its clothes aren't as shiny as you may have heard.

"Wasn't irrelevance, smallness, the dutiful petty life what everyone ultimately wanted to shed? And wasn't shedding as important as embracing, in the formation of an adult self?" ...more

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Sep 13, 2007 Kara added it

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 ...more

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May 22, 2007 Michelle rated it liked it

I was excited to read this book since it had so much "buzz" surrounding it. While it was fine and read quickly, I found myself wondering "who cares?" None of the characters were particularly likeable and the plot wasn't very interesting. ...more

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About Claire Messud

Claire Messud

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Claire Messud is an American novelist and literature and creative writing professor. She is best known as the author of the 2006 novel The Emperor's Children. She lives with her husband and family in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Born in Greenwich, Connecticut, Messud grew up in the United States, Australia, and Canada, returning to the United States as a teenager. Messud's mother is Canadian, and her ...more

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“Geniuses have the shortest biographies.” — 15 likes

“The apartment was entirely, was only, for her: a wall of books, both read and unread, all of them dear to her not only in themselves, their tender spines, but in the moments or periods they evoked. She had kept some books since college that she had acquired for courses and never read—Fredric Jameson, for example, and Kant’s Critique of Judgment—but which suggested to her that she was, or might be, a person of seriousness, a thinker in some seeping, ubiquitous way; and she had kept, too, a handful of children’s books taken fro her now-dismantled girlhood room, like Charlotte’s Web and the Harriet the Spy novels, that conjured for her an earlier, passionately earnest self, the sober child who read constantly in the back of her parents’ Buick, oblivious to her brother punching her knee, oblivious to her parents’ squabbling, oblivious to the traffic and landscapes pressing upon her from outside the window.

She had, in addition to her books, a modest shelf of tapes and CDs that served a similar, though narrower, function…she was aware that her collection was comprised largely of mainstream choices that reflected—whether popular or classical—not so much an individual spirit as the generic tastes of her times: Madonna, the Eurythmics, Tracy Chapman from her adolescence; Cecilia Bartoli, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Mitsuko Uchida; more recently Moby and the posthumously celebrated folk-singing woman from Washington, DC, who had died of a melanoma in her early thirties, and whose tragic tale attracted Danielle more than her familiar songs.

Her self, then, was represented in her books; her times in her records; and the rest of the room she thought of as a pure, blank slate.” — 12 likes

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