The Emperor's Children
Claire Messud, 2006
Random House
528 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307276667
Summary
The Emperor's Children, Claire Messud's richly plotted, densely populated comedy of manners and ideas is set in New York City: not the august, whalebone-corseted New York of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence nor the brainy, feuding city of Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift, but New York at the turn of the 21st century, when restaurants have taken the place of museums—and maybe even churches—and every new magazine launch is billed as the opening salvo of a revolution.
It's a New York where ideas, along with beauty, have become a form of currency, essential for anyone who wants to go anywhere but not to be taken too seriously. Much of the novel's comedy arises from the misunderstandings between those characters who understand this and those who don't: the latter have their hearts broken.
At the novel's center are two young women and a young man, friends since college, who are now entering their thirties. Marina Thwaite is a beautiful "It" girl who by virtue of her looks and connections has been given a contract for a book she's not sure she can write.
Danielle Minkoff is a thoughtful young woman laboring in the purgatory of television and longing romantically for something better.
Julius Clarke is frivolous, hard-living, and famously witty, having parlayed said wit into a career as a downtown critic but not much of a living: to his torment, he has to work temp jobs.
All of these three revolve at varying proximities around Murray Thwaite, Marina's father, an aging liberal journalist of lofty reputation and even higher self-estimation. It's he who is the Emperor of the novel's title. Soon Murray's gravity draws a fourth satellite, his young nephew Bootie, an awkward, worshipful boy who aspires to become a genius and sees Murray as essential to that objective.
It's Bootie's arrival in New York that sets much of the novel's events in motion.
He gets a job as Murray's secretary and — after Julius hooks up with a rich, doting boyfriend — sublets his apartment. He pines for Marina even as she becomes involved with the man Danielle had set her sights on, the elegant, serpentine Australian magazine editor Ludovic Seeley.
And when Bootie's worship of Murray predictably turns sour, he announces his change of heart with a gesture that destroys the equilibrium the other characters—mistakenly or not—took for happiness.
There are comedies that leave a book's characters with whipped cream on their faces and comedies that leave them deeply, and sometimes painfully, changed, and The Emperor's Children is one of those.
Thanks to Claire Messud's deft grasp of character, her flawless eye for New York's social hierarchies, and her deliciously unscrolling sentences, her book also changes the reader. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1966
• Where—Greenwich, CT, USA
• Education—BA, Yale University; M.A. Cambridge University
• Awards—Addison Metcalf Award and Strauss Living Award,
both from the American Academy of Arts & Letters
• Currently—lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts
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, Massachuesetts.
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 father is French from French Algeria (Algeria was a French colony until 1962). She was educated at Milton Academy, Yale University, and Cambridge University, where she met her spouse, the British literary critic James Wood. Messud also briefly attended the MFA program at Syracuse University.
Writing
Messud's debut novel, When The World Was Steady (1995), was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. In 1999, she published her second book, The Last Life, about three generations of a French-Algerian family. Her 2001 work, The Hunters, consists of two novellas.
Her 2006 novel, The Emperor’s Children, was longlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize. Messud wrote the novel while a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2004–2005. The Woman Upstairs came out in 2014 and her most recent, The Burning Girl, in 2017.
Teaching
Messud has taught creative writing at Kenyon College, University of Maryland, Amherst College, in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers in North Carolina, and in the Graduate Writing program at The Johns Hopkins University. Messud also taught at the Sewanee: The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Each spring semester, beginning 2009, Messud teaches a literary traditions course as a part of CUNY Hunter College's MFA Program in Creative Writing.
She is on the editorial board of the literary magazine The Common, based at Amherst College. She has contributed articles to publications such as The New York Review of Books.[6]
Honors
The American Academy of Arts and Letters has recognized Messud's talent with both an Addison Metcalf Award and a Strauss Living Award. She was considered for the 2003 Granta Best of Young British Novelists list, although none of the three passports she holds is British. As of 2010–2011, she is a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin / Institute of Advanced Study. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
In tracing each of these characters’ trajectories, Ms. Messud does a nimble, quicksilver job of portraying her central characters from within and without — showing us their pretensions, frailties and self-delusions, even as she delineates their secret yearnings and fears. At the same time, she uses their stories to explore many of the same questions she explicated so masterfully in The Last Life questions about how an individual hammers out an identity of his or her own under the umbrella of a powerful family, questions about the ways in which people mythologize their own lives and the lives of those they love.
Michiko Kakutani - The New York Times
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.
Ron Charles - THe Washington Post
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 entr e 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.
Publishers Weekly
Beautiful, Ivy League-educated, and the daughter of a renowned journalist, Marina Thwaite lives in New York City along with two close friends from Brown: television producer Danielle and freelance writer Julius, who is gay. All three are just barely 30 and making their way into adulthood. Marina has recently broken up with a longtime lover she thought she might marry and is struggling to finish a book whose advance is long spent. Meanwhile, Danielle is returning from an investigative trip to Australia, and Julius is trying to figure out how to make ends meet without admitting to his friends that he's flat broke. Enter Marina's young cousin, Bootie, a college dropout who's decided that life in New York City has got to be better than life in upstate New York. Bootie's arrival in the city is a catalyst for events that will change all their lives forever. Messud's (The Hunters) comedy of manners is extremely well written and features characters that come alive. The reader will be tugged in many directions as these characters' lives intersect in the realms of love, family, friendship, and tragedy. This wonderful read is an insightful look at our time and the decisions people make. Highly recommended.—Robin Nesbitt, Columbus Metropolitan Lib., OH
Library Journal
A stinging portrait of life among Manhattan's junior glitterati. In March 2001, a decade after they met at Brown, three best friends are finding it hard to be 30. Danielle Minkoff is the most established, although her job in TV news largely entails cranking out puff pieces on the dangers of, say, liposuction. Freelance critic Julius Clarke wonders how much longer a hip social life can substitute for a regular income. They're both strivers from the Midwest, while Marina Thwaite was born into the liberal elite: Father Murray is a crusading journalist, mom Annabel a dedicated social worker. But beautiful Marina is floundering, at sea in the book she's supposedly writing, about children's clothing, living with her parents after the breakup of a long-time romance. Their uneasy stasis is disrupted by two new arrivals. Australian Ludovic Seeley, funded by a Murdoch-like mogul to edit a new magazine, The Monitor, latches onto Marina, giving her the confidence to finish her manuscript as well as its glib title, The Emperor's Children Have No Clothes. College dropout Bootie Tubb, the 19-year-old son of Murray's sister, arrives from Watertown, N.Y., hoping to learn from his famous uncle how to be an intellectual. Bootie is swiftly disillusioned—unsurprisingly, since Murray's self-absorption is surpassed only by that of his daughter, one of the most narcissistic characters in recent fiction. Messud deftly paints the neurotic uncertainties of people who know they're privileged and feel sorry for themselves anyway; she makes her characters human enough so we don't entirely detest them, but overall, they're a distasteful bunch. In this shallow world, the enigmatic but clearly malevolent Ludovic is bound to succeed, even though The Monitor's launch is scuttled by the attack on the World Trade Center. It's a bit disconcerting to find 9/11 so smoothly integrated into the author's thematic concerns and plot development—it believably motivates the breakup of Murray's affair with Danielle—but five years on, perhaps it's time for this catastrophe to enter the realm of worthy fictional material. Intelligent, evocative and unsparing.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. At the novel's onset, most of the characters are outside New York: Danielle in Australia, pursuing an idea for a story and finding someone to have a crush on; Marina at her parents' summer house in Stockbridge, accompanied by Julius; and Bootie in his mother's house in upstate New York. Why might Messud have chosen to begin in this manner? At what other points in the book do the characters leave the city and with what results?
2. Messud introduces her characters through their environments: the womblike bathroom where Bootie soaks in hot water and serious literature; the Thwaites' resplendent Central Park West apartment; and Danielle's pristine, aesthetically climate-controlled studio. What do these spaces tell us about their occupants? Why might the author have used this rather old-fashioned way of ushering us into a novel set in 2001? Where else does she employ the techniques of an earlier age of literature?
3. Which of the novel's characters strikes you as its moral center? Is it Bootie, who comes to New York with such high ideals and easily rankled feelings? Is it Danielle, who has lived there long enough to feel at home there but who still sees its pretensions and absurdities? With which of these characters is the reader meant to identify? Whose judgments seem the most reliable? And what flaws or blind spots afflict even him or her?
4. Julius is obsessed with the characters of Pierre and Natasha from War and Peace, longing to be the sparkling Natasha but fearing he's really more like the brooding, self-conscious Pierre. Bootie is constantly reading Emerson. Which of the other characters has an emblematic book, and what role do those books play in their lives, in the way they see the world, and, of course, the way they see themselves? Is Julius anything like Pierre or Natasha? Does Bootie really live up to Emerson's criterion of genius? At what points do they similarly misread other characters?
5. In addition to reading, many of Messud's people are also engaged in writing: Marina has her book-in-progress and Murray has his (which he's thinking of calling How to Live), and Bootie has his essay on Murray (and Murray's book). What is their relationship to their writing? What do they hope to achieve through it? How do other characters respond to it? Does Messud give us any indication as to which of these characters' work is good (or genuine) and which is failed or fraudulent?
6. Almost everybody in The Emperor's Children envies, and is intimidated by, somebody else. Julius, for instance, is in awe of Marina's self-confidence and envious of her sense of entitlement. Marina is cowed by her father. And poor Bootie is a virtual pressure cooker of indiscriminate awe and resentment. What sort of things do Messud's characters feel insecure about? Is there anyone in the book who seems truly comfortable with him or herself or any relationship that seems to be conducted by equals? Would you say that awe and envy are this novel's dominant emotions?
7. Marina, we learn, frequently accompanies Murray to public functions, and is sometimes mistaken for his "trophy wife." [35] Does their relationship strike you as incestuous (in which case it's a brilliant stroke of Messud to make Ludovic call her "her father's Anna Freud [110]")? Compare Marina's unfolding relationship with Ludovic to her bond with her father. Do you think that Ludovic—incidentally, the only major character who is seen entirely from the outside, through the eyes of others—really loves Marina or is merely using her, and if so for what purpose?
8. Just as Marina has symbolically taken over her mother's role, "Danielle had the peculiar sensation of having usurped her friend's role in the Thwaite family, and more than that, of having usurped it at some moment in the distant past, a decade or more ago: she felt like a teenager...and she was suddenly, powerfully aware of the profound oddity of Marina's present life, a life arrested at, or at least returned to, childhood." [41] How many of the other characters seem similarly suspended? Which of them seems like a full-grown adult, and what does it mean to be an adult in the scheme of this novel? If Danielle has indeed usurped Marina's place, what is the significance of her affair with Marina's father? Which of the other characters takes on another character's role, and for what reasons?
9. When pressed to take a job, Marina confesses, "I worry that that will make me ordinary, like everybody else." [67] To what extent are other characters possessed by the same fear, and how do they defend themselves against it? Do they have a common idea of what constitutes ordinariness? Can ordinariness even exist in a social world in which everyone is constantly, feverishly striving to be unique? Is it possible that Marina is just lazy and prevaricating in her charming way?
10. With his high-flown ambitions, his indolence, and his appalling sense of hygiene, Bootie initially seems like a comic character. But in the course of the novel Messud's portrait of him darkens until he comes to seem either sinister or tragic-perhaps both. How does she accomplish this? Which other characters does she gradually reveal in a different light? Compare Messud's shifting portrayal of Bootie to her handling of Julius and Danielle. In what ways do they too evade or defy the reader's initial expectations about them?
11. Ludovic repeatedly declares that he wants to make a revolution with his magazine The Monitor, but what is the magazine supposed to be about? Lest we think that The Emperor's Children is merely a satire of the New York media, what other highly touted ideas in this novel turn out to be light on substance, and what does this suggest about the value of ideas at this historical moment?
12. On similar lines, both Ludovic and Bootie denounce Murray as a fraud while Bootie in particular prides himself on his sincerity. But is such sincerity a good thing? What other characters embrace that virtue, and with what results? Compare Bootie's frank literary assessment of his uncle with Murray's frank critique of his daughter's manuscript, or his even franker response to Bootie's essay. When in this novel does honesty turn out to be a pretext for something else? And when do subterfuge and deception turn out to be acts of kindness?
13. Murray feels that his mother's efforts at improving him succeeded only in "turning her boy into someone, something, she couldn't understand." [123] By contrast, he thinks, Marina has been paralyzed by the very expansiveness of her upbringing. What does this novel have to say about parents and children? Which of the Emperor's children has proved a disappointment to his or her parents? Does any parent in this novel (Murray, Annabel, Judy, Randy) truly understand his or her offspring? And is it good for said offspring to be understood?
14. Some of Messud's characters begin the novel in a state of happiness and others attain it, but nearly all of them see their happiness threatened or even shattered. How does this come about? Which of them is the victim of outside forces and which is responsible for his or her fall? How would you describe this novel's vision of happiness? Considering that the typical comedy has a happy (or happy-ish) ending, what do you make of the fact that so many of Messud's characters end up bereft or disappointed?
15. Among this novel's many characters, one has to include the character of New York City. How does Messud bring the city to life? Compare Murray's New York with Marina's and Danielle's, Bootie's and Julius's. What is it that draws a Bootie Tubb and a Julius Clarke, a Danielle Minkoff and a Ludovic Seeley to prove themselves in New York?
16. What role do the events of September 11, 2001, play in The Emperor's Children? Are there other points when history-or, put another way, reality-impinges on the safe and mostly privileged world its characters inhabit? What is the significance of Annabel Thwaite's client DeVaughn or results of Julius and David's affair? Does the ending make sense when compared with the rest of the novel?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
top of page (summary)