IN a world of surface, deeply felt sympathy is hard to come by and hard to put much faith in. Marina, Danielle and Julius, the characters at the center of Claire Messud’s deceptively enjoyable novel, deceptive in that her light, narrative touch and skill at stockpiling quirky, telling events make it initially hard to accept that she has a larger, darker purpose, seem constantly to be asking us whether we like them, whether we think they’re doing the right thing, how it will all turn out for them, even when their behavior is trivial, silly or morally dubious.
A group of New Yorkers hovering around the awkward age of 30, privileged, bonded by lengthy friendship despite mutual irritations and bewilderments, they are ready to make their mark; but to what extent their ambitions are feasible, desirable or even justifiable is a question that quietly resonates as the story meanders through 2001 up to, and just beyond, the moment that the airplanes start to hit the World Trade Center and render it almost obscene in its vapidity and irrelevance.
“It’d be interesting to find what they’re doing, what they think they’re doing it for,” remarks Danielle during a sketchily argued attempt to persuade Marina that a resurgence in the satirical press (the Onion, McSweeney’s, the New York Observer are all name-checked, establishing the book’s media-savviness) is suggestive of pre-revolutionary activity along the lines of Dostoevsky and Turgenev. But why is she even mentioning it? Perhaps less because it’s a great idea for the television company she struggles to make documentaries for than because of the covert attraction she feels toward Ludovic Seeley, an Australian she has recently encountered in Sydney (while failing to make a program about the treatment of the Aborigines), who is poised to relocate to Manhattan and simultaneously launch a magazine and a hostile takeover bid for the city’s intellectual establishment.
Prime target in Seeley’s cross-hairs is Marina’s father, Murray Thwaite, campaigning journalist and deliciously drawn monster (that he is a sexual predator, rampant egotist and author of a secret magnum opus, How to Live, confirms his ludicrousness, just as it endears him to us).
But to imply that The Emperor’s Children succeeds only through its satirical energies would be to downplay Messud’s talents as a miniaturist; she is as much interested in her characters’ inner lives as she is in writing social comedy. Thus the novel also examines the claustrophobic, quasi-romantic relationship between Marina and Murray, causing us to notice how much more central Messud makes fathers than mothers, confirmed in a wonderful episode in which these two Thwaites creep away from the family’s dead cat, leaving the corpse for the materfamilias to discover and dispose of; the ambivalent lure of self-expression, whether in writing, or intellectual endeavor, or, in Julius’s case, in hastily found and discarded sex; the benefits of outsider status, summed up by Bootie, Murray’s clever but gauche nephew, who has renounced university on the grounds of its fakery, and come to New York, ironically, in search of authenticity.
It is Bootie who blows the joint wide open, who conducts a shocking, amoral and vertiginously selfish experiment into what it might mean not to tolerate an existence in a world like this, to opt out of it without surrendering one’s principles. Not without casualties, Messud concludes, but the steely voice that lurks beneath her glittering, whirling narrative tells us that that might have been the only choice he had.
