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.
Spoiled thirty-somethings in New York City seek greater self-importance while interesting poor kid tries to make good and is shunned. Yay. Why do I keep turning the pages?Oh right, because I’m a thirty-something in New York City. Unfortunately, the thirty-somethings in the novel are very different (hopefully) and much less interesting (again, hopefully).To her credit, Messud’s writing, aside from an occasional bout of hyperverbosity, is spot on; she captures the emptiness of her characters beautifully. They live more in their fancy than in reality, trusting their ideas of other people and the world around them more than the evidence that stares them in the face. They navigate the world through the blinders of privilege and carry torches for irresponsibility and whim. They are modern day Buchanans. But with only Bootie, the curious and incisive out-of-towner, to play the role of Nick—Bootie, who comes and goes in the text—the novel doesn’t deliver the way The Great Gatsby does. Bootie is certainly the protagonist of the novel, but he exists too far from the center of the novel, and as a result, his revelations are too much like easily overlooked footnotes.Further, the events of 9/11 are a disappointing deus ex machina. They force a few characters to reevaluate their priorities, but they avert the confrontations that would really test and reveal the characters’ values. Characters are pushed into a forced retreat, and we are left feeling bitter that the dastards haven’t received their due. But maybe that’s the point. Are we meant to be sympathetic to the characters, or is The Emperor’s Children a scathing criticism? The title would suggest the latter. The characters believe in their trappings, and we can see right through them. But if this is Messud’s plan, it seems to me that she indulges them a little too much. She gives us too much time with the Thwaites and the Seeleys, and we’re let into their thoughts a little too much.Which brings me to the narrator. I’ve written before that the third-person omniscient narrator, with some authors, turns into a wildly unstable voice. Characters’ thoughts and mannerisms often slip in and out of the narrative without any announcement. Messud falls into this trap. I haven’t decided yet whether I think this is a problem, but it continues, in my mind, to be a source of inconsistency in the prose.All told, I must confess that once I forced myself through the first fifty pages, I was hooked on the plot. It was like reading celebrity magazines. I couldn’t help but be curious about the trials and tribulations of the rich and famous. Is that, too, Messud’s point? ...that we succumb to our own titillation and secretly wish the downfall of those we ogle?Do I recommend it? Maybe for the beach. There are so many other books to read…Would I teach it? Nope. Too much emperor, not enough people seeing through his clothes.Lasting impressions: Unsatisfied. Messud’s story offers some brain candy, some subtle commentary, and a few too many descriptions of West Side apartment lobbies.
What do You think about The Emperor's Children (2006)?
The first chapter seemed so much like an airport romance novel that I almost stopped reading, sure I had gotten this book confused with another. I wish I had stopped then, or I wish it would have been a flighty romance. Instead, I cringed my way through this sophomoric Love Actually-meets-existentialism and its stilted dialogue and pretentious pseudo-philosophic prose only to be put off *SPOILER-ISH ALERT* by the author's reliance on 9/11 as a pivot point for all of the characters. I'm not against the use of a national tragedy as a major plot point -- I really liked Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close -- but Messud used 9/11 to spur all of her characters to take drastic (and mostly predictable) actions in their lives. It seemed forced, and I was really turned off by the laziness of it all. Also, for god's sake, sentences that run half a page and include innumerable phrases set off by m-dashes, parentheses, and semicolons are confusing! I plow my way through them in legal texts and Russian classics, but in a book this light on substance, that style is totally unnecessary and counterproductive.
—Briana
I liked this book, though not as much as Dad. When I got to the climax of the book, the place where all the characters had to shift in relation to the big event, I felt duped, like, oh--this was why you put me through the first 400 pages of rich people being rich and worrying about rich things: to show me how inconsequential everything is, even though I already knew that, because I don't give a damn about rich people being rich a-holes. I didn't really feel connected to most of the characters...but I did like the lady who has an affair with someone's dad, and I liked the young asshole literary kid...the sweaty, chubby one who earnestly imagines himself to be a writer despite never having written anything. When he does write something, he is so convinced of his own superiority and genius that he believes that whatever he writes, even if it's hurtful--it will be embraced by his family and the literary community at large. It's a really good, painful lesson for a writer to learn: even if it's true, it doesn't make you less of a shit that you wrote it. Anyway, to me, these were the only sympathetic characters.
—Katie
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.
—Galen Johnson
