I’m the last person I know to learn about American writer Claire Messud. The owner of my local cafe knows who she is. He has a copy of her first novel When the World Was Steady on the shelf above his drum kit. The girl in my video store was reading Messud’s novella The Hunters last week. And when my son’s teacher saw me carrying Messud’s latest hardback she said she’d heard it was a 9/11 book. Which isn’t quite true but I’ll come back to that. The point is, I feel my ignorance makes me singularly well placed to review Claire Messud’s novel The Emperor’s Children. I came to this book with no baggage, and I enjoyed it, with caveats.
In The Emperor’s Children, Messud’s fourth book, she writes about three smart and sassy friends – Danielle, Marina and Julius – who met at Brown University and are now pushing thirty, living in Manhattan, and searching for the best way to use their considerable talents in the liberal arts.
Danielle Minkoff is a frustrated television producer who wants to make worthy documentaries but is instead working on a show about liposuction. Julius Clarke writes for The Village Voice, and secretly takes temp jobs to pay the rent. And Marina Thwaite, the beautiful daughter of celebrated journalist Murray Thwaite, is living with her parents in their Central Park West apartment while she tinkers with a manuscript Vogue commissioned her to write.
In fact, the title of this crisp, complex, satirical novel is borrowed from Marina Thwaite, whose rather fluffy manuscript is called ‘The Emperor’s Children Have No Clothes’ – an examination of the cultural significance of children’s clothes through history. Having received a hefty advance for the manuscript Marina is bound to finish it, though she knows it to be ‘chicken scratches on paper, meagre and disturbingly free of import’.
Work features largely in the three friend’s lives; that is, the identity-defining work they feel they should be doing as opposed to the inadequate work they must do. Neither Marina nor Julius want to work at all, but there seems no other way to stamp a mark on Manhattan, especially when they are getting on in years. At thirty, Julius is aware that ‘some actual sustained endeavour might be in order were he not to fade, wisplike, away, from charming wastrel to needy, boring failure.’
The eponymous emperor of this novel, around whom all the characters spin, is Murray Thwaite. Murray is the voice of Sixties liberalism, a man who prides himself on speaking the truth. In between newspaper columns and lectures, he works on what he hopes will be his greatest book, How to Live. Which is a bit funny, given that he’s a vain man with a snarly temper, hiding a string of extramarital affairs. His iconic status shields him from criticism though. As his housekeeper says, ‘everyone pretended Mr Murray was an easy man. Even with one another, they pretended.’
Murray’s ever-stoic, Waspish wife Annabel works as a children’s rights lawyer. She’s the only member of the family with a full-time job, yet she is endlessly expected to tend to Murray and Marina. She helps the downtrodden of New York that Murray prefers to confine to the page. When one of Annabel’s disadvantaged wards needs a bed for the night Murray is less than welcoming. Writing about the disenfranchised is one thing, helping them is quite another.
Into this entitled circle come two intruders: Ludovic Seeley and Frederick ‘Bootie’ Tubb. Ludovic is an ambitious and manipulative Australian publisher who is setting up a magazine, The Monitor. He chooses Marina as his way of accessing Manhattan’s urban glitterati, especially her father, who he simultaneously admires and loathes. At first, Seeley looks to be the novel’s moustache-twirling villain, but it is Bootie who turns out to be the real threat.
Bootie is chubby, awkward, and lacking the most rudimentary social graces. And he is the most intriguing character in the novel. He moves to Manhattan to be with his uncle Murray, who he idolises. Bootie plans to become a self-made intellectual, shunning university in favour of working through his own reading list. Murray offers to mentor him but the relationship sours when Bootie decides that his first piece of writing will be an expose of his uncle for Ludovic’s new magazine, showing Murray to be a heavy-drinking, philandering has-been.
Then the planes hit the Twin Towers and everything changes. It is significant that this novel is set in Manhattan in the months before and weeks after 9/11 but this is not a book about 9/11. The event has enormous impact on each of the characters, of course. It forces major decisions, and puts an end to some arrested development, but our cosseted group emerges unscathed. For Murray, the catastrophe frees him from a muddled affair and offers a chance to opine on a fresh topic. Otherwise, September 11 seems like an intrusion in the book. It means the two main lines of conflict – Murray versus Ludovic, and Murray versus Bootie – fizzle out rather than come to a head. But keep an eye on Bootie. The actions of the terrorists make a disturbing impact on his thinking.
As an aside, the cover of The Emperor’s Children features a moody shot of the Beresford Building, an exclusive apartment block that sits on the edge of Central Park’s Upper West Side. The building was completed a few weeks before the stock market crash of 1929, and with its own sets of twin towers reminds of another time when history intruded on the lives of the rich.
I enjoyed reading about these privileged New Yorkers. They’re interesting people although they are self-obsessed and precocious. Messud doesn’t seem to like any of them very much, keeping a distant and calmly critical eye on them.
The Emperor’s Children is literary in its language and highbrow in its concerns, but the story races along like the best, most gossipy Edith Wharton novel. Chapters are short but sentences are often unbearably long. Messud has a wonderful eye for detail but the density of her prose had me rereading whole paragraphs for sense. And the first chapter of this novel seems to belong to another book. It describes the first meeting of Ludovic and Danielle and while a captivating scene is set, it’s irrelevant to what follows. You could almost skip it and start at chapter two. In fact, do that. You don’t need the first dozen pages. But the rest of the novel is a terrific read.
