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The Emperor's Children
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The Emperor's Children Hardback - 2006

by Claire Messud


Summary

The Emperor's Children is a richly drawn, brilliantly observed novel of fate and fortune--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. In this tour de force, the celebrated author Claire Messud brings to life a city, a generation, and the way we live in this moment.From the Trade Paperback edition.

From the publisher

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.
There is beautiful, sophisticated Marina Thwaite--an "It" girl finishing her first book; the daughter of Murray Thwaite, celebrated intellectual and journalist--and her two closest friends from Brown, Danielle, a quietly appealing television producer, and Julius, a cash-strapped freelance critic. The delicious complications that arise among them become dangerous when Murray's nephew, Frederick "Bootie" Tubb, an idealistic college dropout determined to make his mark, comes to town. As the skies darken, it is Bootie's unexpected decisions--and their stunning, heartbreaking outcome--that will change each of their lives forever. A richly drawn, brilliantly observed novel of fate and fortune--of innocence and experience, seduction and self-invention; of ambition, including literary ambition; of glamour, disaster, and promise--"The Emperor's Children "is a tour de force that brings to life a city, a generation, and the way we live in this moment.

Details

  • Title The Emperor's Children
  • Author Claire Messud
  • Binding Hardback
  • Edition 1st/6th
  • Pages 448
  • Language EN
  • Publisher Knopf, New York
  • Date August 29, 2006
  • ISBN 9780307264190

Excerpt

Our Chef Is Very Famous in London

Darlings! Welcome! And you must be Danielle?” Sleek and small, her wide eyes rendered enormous by kohl, Lucy Leverett, in spite of her resemblance to a baby seal, rasped impressively. Her dangling fan earrings clanked at her neck as she leaned in to kiss each of them, Danielle too, and although she held her cigarette, in its mother-of-pearl holder, at arm’s length, its smoke wafted between them and brought tears to Danielle’s eyes.

Danielle didn’t wipe them, for fear of disturbing her makeup. Having spent half an hour putting on her face in front of the grainy mirror of Moira and John’s bathroom, ogling her imperfections and applying vigorous remedial spackle—beneath which her weary, olive-shaped eyes were pouched by bluish bags, the curves of her nostrils oddly red, and her high forehead peeling—she had no intention of revealing to strangers the disintegration beneath her paint.

“Come in, darlings, come in.” Lucy moved behind them and herded the trio toward the party. The Leveretts’ living room was painted a deep purple—aubergine, in local parlance—and its windows were draped with velvet. From the ceiling hung a brutal wrought iron chandelier, like something salvaged from a medieval castle. Three men loitered by the bay window, talking to one another while staring out at the street, their glasses of red wine luminous in the reflected evening light. A long, plump, pillowed sofa stretched the length of one wall, and upon it four women were disposed like odalisques in a harem. Two occupied opposite ends of the divan, their legs tucked under, their extended arms caressing the cushions, while between them one rested her head upon another’s lap, and smiling, eyes closed, whispered to the ceiling while her friend stroked her abundant hair. The whole effect was, for Danielle, faintly cloudy, as if she had walked into someone else’s dream. She kept feeling this, in Sydney, so far from home: she couldn’t quite say it wasn’t real, but it certainly wasn’t her reality.

“Rog? Rog, more wine!” Lucy called to the innards of the house, then turned again to her guests, a proprietorial arm on Danielle’s bicep. “Red or white? He’s probably even got pink, if you’re after it. Can’t bear it myself—so California.” She grinned, and from her crows’ feet, Danielle knew she was forty, or almost.

Two men bearing bottles emerged from the candlelit gloom of the dining room, both slender, both at first glance slightly fey. Danielle took the imposing one in front, in a pressed lavender shirt and with, above hooded eyes, a high, smooth Nabokovian brow, to be her host. She extended a hand. “I’m Danielle.” His fingers were elegant, and his palm, when it pressed hers, was cool.

“Are you now?” he said.

The other man, at least a decade older, slightly snaggletoothed and goateed, spoke from behind his shoulder. “I’m Roger,” he said. “Good to see you. Don’t mind Ludo, he’s playing hard to get.”

“Ludovic Seeley,” Lucy offered. “Danielle—”

“Minkoff.”

“Moira and John’s friend. From New York.”

“New York,” Ludovic Seeley repeated. “I’m moving there next month.”

“Red or white?” asked Roger, whose open shirt revealed a tanned breast dotted with sparse gray hairs and divided by a narrow gold chain.

“Red, please.”

“Good choice,” said Seeley, almost in a whisper. He was—she could feel it rather than see it, because his hooded eyes did not so much as flicker—looking her up and down. She hoped that her makeup was properly mixed in, that no clump of powder had gathered dustily upon her chin or cheek.

The moment of recognition was, for Danielle, instantaneous. Here, of all places, in this peculiar and irrelevant enclave, she had spotted a familiar. She wondered if he, too, experienced it: the knowledge that this mattered. Ludovic Seeley: she did not know who he was, and yet she felt she knew him, or had been waiting for him. It was not merely his physical presence, the long, feline slope of him, a quality at once loose and controlled, as if he played with the illusion of looseness. Nor was it the timbre of his voice, deep and yet not particularly resonant, its Australian inflection so slight as to be almost British. It was, she decided, something in his face: he knew. Although what he knew she could not have said. There were the eyes, a surprising deep and gold-flecked gray, their lines slightly downturned in an expression both mournful and amused, and the particular small furrow that cut into his right cheek when he smiled even slightly. His ears, pinned close to his head, lent him a tidy aspect; his dark hair, so closely shaven as to allow the blue of his scalp to shine through, emphasized both his irony and his restraint. His skin was pale, almost as pale as Danielle’s own, and his nose a fine, sharp stretch of cartilage. His face, so distinctive, struck her as that of a nineteenth-century portrait, a Sargent perhaps, an embodiment of sardonic wisdom and society, of aristocratic refinement. And yet in the fall of his shirt, the line of his torso, the graceful but not unmanly movement of his slender fingers (and yes, discreetly, but definitely there, he had hair on the backs of his hands—she held to it, as a point of attraction: men ought not to be hairless), he was distinctly of the present. What he knew, perhaps, was what he wanted.

“Come on, darling.” Lucy took her by the elbow. “Let’s introduce you to the rest of the gang.”





This, dinner at the Leveretts’, was Danielle’s last evening in Sydney before heading home. In the morning, she would board the plane and sleep, sleep her way back to yesterday, or by tomorrow, to today, in New York. She’d been away a week, researching a possible television program, with the help of her friend Moira. It wouldn’t be filmed for months, if it were filmed at all, a program about the relationship between the Aborigines and their government, the formal apologies and amends of recent years. The idea was to explore the possibility of reparations to African Americans—a high-profile professor was publishing a book about it—through the Australian prism. It wasn’t clear even to Danielle whether this could fly. Could an American audience care less about the Aborigines? Were the situations even comparable? The week had been filled with meetings and bluster, the zealous singing exchanges of her business, the pretense of certainty where in fact there was none at all. Moira firmly believed it could be done, that it should be done; but Danielle was not convinced.

Sydney was a long way from home. For a week, in her pleasant waft of alienation, Danielle had indulged the fantasy of another possible life—Moira, after all, had left New York for Sydney only two years before—and with it, another future. She rarely considered a life elsewhere; the way, she supposed, with faint incredulity, most people never considered a life in New York. From her bedroom in her friends’ lacy tin-roofed row house at the end of a shady street in Balmain, Danielle could see the water. Not the great sweep of the harbor, with its arcing bridge, nor the ruffled seagull’s wings of the opera house, but a placid stretch of blue beyond the park below, rippled by the wake of occasional ferries and winking in the early evening sunlight.

Early autumn in Sydney, it was still bitter at home. Small, brightly colored birds clustered in the jacaranda trees, trilling their joyous disharmonies. In earliest morning, she had glimpsed, against a dawn-dappled shrub in the backyard, an enormous dew-soaked spiderweb, its intricacies sparkling, and poised, at its edge, an enormous furry spider. Nature was in the city, here. It was another world. She had imagined watching her 747 soar away without her, a new life beginning.

But not really. She was a New Yorker. There was, for Danielle Minkoff, only New York. Her work was there, her friends were there—even her remote acquaintances from college at Brown ten years ago were there—and she had made her home in the cacophonous, cozy comfort of the Village. From her studio in its bleached-brick high-rise at Sixth Avenue and Twelfth Street, she surveyed lower Manhattan like a captain at the prow of her ship. Beleaguered and poor though she sometimes felt, or craving an interruption in the sea of asphalt and iron, a silence in the tide of chatter, she couldn’t imagine giving it up. Sometimes she joked to her mother—raised, as she herself had been, in Columbus, Ohio, and now a resident of Florida—that they’d have to carry her out feet first. There was no place like New York. And Australia, in comparison, was, well, Oz.

This last supper in Sydney was a purely social event. Where the Leveretts lived seemed like an area in which one or two ungentrified Aboriginal people might still linger, gray-haired and bleary, outside the pub at the end of the road: people who, pint in hand, hadn’t accepted the government’s apology and moved on. Or perhaps not, perhaps Danielle was merely imagining the area, its residents, as they had once been: for a second glance at the BMWs and Audis lining the curb suggested that the new Sydney (like the new New York) had already, and eagerly, edged its way in.

Moira was friendly with Lucy Leverett, who owned a small but influential gallery down at The Rocks that specialized in Aboriginal art. Her husband, Roger, was a novelist. As John parked the car outside the Leveretts’ large Victorian row house, Moira had explained, “Lucy’s great. She’s done a lot on the art scene here. And if you want to meet Aboriginal artists, to talk to them for the film, she’s your woman.”

“And he?”

“Well”—John had pulled a rueful moue—“his novels are no bloody good—”

“But we like him,” Moira finished firmly.

“I’ll give him this much, he’s got great taste in wine.”

“Roger’s lovely,” Moira insisted. “And it’s true about his books, but he’s very powerful here in Sydney. He could really help you, if you needed him.”

“Roger Leverett?” Danielle thought a moment. “I’ve never heard of him.”

“Not surprised.”

“As in ‘our chef is very famous in London.’ ”

“Come again?”

“There’s a nasty-looking little Chinese restaurant in the East Village with a handwritten sign in the window—a dirty window, too—that says ‘our chef is very famous in London.’ But not in New York, or anywhere else outside of London.”

“And probably not in London either, eh?” John had said, as they approached the Leveretts’ front door.

“Roger Leverett is very famous in Sydney, sweetheart, whatever you say.”





At supper—prawns and quails’ eggs with squid-ink noodles, followed by emu, which closely resembled steak and which she had to force herself to eat—Danielle sat between Roger and a beautiful Asian boy—Ito? Iko?—who was the boyfriend of an older architect named Gary at the other end of the table. Ludovic Seeley sat next to Moira, his arm languidly and familiarly draped over the back of her chair, and he leaned in to speak to her as though confiding secrets. Danielle glanced over every so often, unable to stop herself, but did not once, until the passion fruit sorbet was before them, find him looking her way. When he did, his spectacular eyes seemed again amused, and they did not waver. It was she who lowered her gaze, shifting in her chair and feigning sudden interest in Ito/Iko’s recent trip to Tahiti.

The evening now seemed to her an elaborate theater, the sole purpose of which was meeting Ludovic Seeley. That anyone could care for Lucy or Roger or Gary or Ito/Iko in the way Danielle cared for her friends in New York seemed almost implausible: these people, to her, were actors. Only Ludovic was, in his intimate whisperings and unbroken glances, very real. Whatever that meant. Reality, or rather, facing it, was Danielle’s great credo; although if she were wholly honest, here and now, she believed a little in magic, too.

Roger, beside her, was jovial and solicitous. Mostly, Danielle felt her host was a narcissist, delighted by the sound of his own voice and the humor of his own jokes, and by the pipe he fiddled with and sucked upon between courses. He was generous with the red wine, more so to her and himself than to those farther afield, and he grew more positively loquacious with each glass.

“Been to McLaren Vale? Not this time? When do you leave? Ah, well then. Next time, promise me you’ll get to South Australia, do the wine route. And there’s great scuba diving off the coast. Been scuba diving? No, well, I can see you might be intimidated. I used to do a lot of diving in my day, but you can get yourself in some very nasty situations, very nasty indeed. About twenty years ago—I wasn’t much older than you are now—how old are you? Thirty? Well, you don’t look it, my girl. Such fine skin. It must be those fine Jewish genes—you are Jewish, aren’t you? Yes, well, anyway, the Reef. I was up diving with some mates, this is before Lucy, she’d never let me do it now. I was living up near Brisbane, finishing my second novel—Revelation Road, you probably don’t know it? No, well, I’m not vain about these things. It was a great success at the time. And anyway, this trip out to the Reef was the reward, you know, for a job well done, the editor was jumping up and down in Sydney he was so mad about the manuscript, but I said, screw it, George, I’m entitled to celebrate before I come back, because once you’re in this world you’re in it, aren’t you? So where was I? The Reef, yes. It was my first time out there, by helicopter, of course—first time in a copter, if you can believe it—and we were four blokes . . .”

Roger’s blithe torrent grew murkier to Danielle with each sip of claret, and she pasted her smile—quite genuine; she was enjoying herself, and lord knew it wasn’t effortful—in permanence upon her face. She smiled while slurping the inky noodles, while dissecting the antennaed prawns. She felt as though she smiled even while chewing the rather tough emu fillet, plucking the dense slices from their bed of bloodied polenta. She smiled while glancing at Ludovic Seeley, who did not glance back, and smiled at Moira, at Lucy, at John in turn. When Roger went to fetch the dessert—“I do the wine, my dear, and the clearing up. The fetching and carrying. And I make the meanest risotto you’ll ever taste, but not tonight, not tonight”—Danielle turned to Ito/Iko and learned that he was twenty-two, an apprentice in a fashion house, that he’d known Gary eight months, and that they’d recently had the most fabulous holiday in Tahiti, “very Gauguin, and so sexy. I mean, the people on that island are so sexy, it’s to die.”

“Is that where Captain Cook got killed, in the end?” Danielle asked, feeling very culturally au fait to be dropping the founder’s name.

“Oh no, doll, that was Hawaii. Very different vibe altogether. Totally different.” Ito/Iko flashed a broad smile and fluffed at his hair, which was, she decided, slightly tinted with blue, and glistening in the candlelight. “You haven’t been here very long, have you? Because everyone knows it was Hawaii. I mean, I know it was Hawaii, and I dropped out of school at sixteen.”





After the meal, the party resettled in the living room, where Ito/Iko curled under Gary’s arm like a chick beneath a hen’s wing. Danielle gratefully abandoned her wineglass at the table, and sat sipping water as movement and general conversation buzzed around her in a pleasant fog. She felt a thrill of alarm—of life—when Ludovic Seeley took the armchair to her right.

“What takes you to New York?” she asked.

He leaned in, as she’d seen him do with Moira: intimacy, or the impression of it, was clearly his mode. But he did not touch her. His shirt cuff glowed against the plum velvet of the chair arm. “Revolution,” he said.

“I’m sorry?”

“I’m going to foment revolution.”

She blinked, sipped, attempted silently to invite elucidation. She didn’t want to seem to him unsubtle, unironic, American.

“Seriously? Seriously, I’m going to edit a magazine.”

“What magazine is that?”

“The Monitor.”

She shook her head.

“Of course you haven’t heard of it—I haven’t got there yet. It doesn’t exist yet.”

“That’s a challenge.”

“I’ve got Merton behind me. I like a challenge.” Danielle took this in. Augustus Merton, the Australian mogul. Busy buying up Europe, Asia, North America. Everything in English and all to the right. The enemy.

Lucy, bearing coffee, appeared suddenly, tinily, before them. “He’s done it before, Danielle. He’s a man to be afraid of, our Ludo. He’s got all the politicians and the journos on the run in this town. The True Voice—have you seen it?”

“Oh. Moira told me about it. I mean, she told me about you.”

“We don’t see eye to eye on pretty much anything,” Lucy said with a conciliatory smile at Seeley, touching her delicate hand with its black nail polish to his lavender shoulder. “But my God, this bloke makes me laugh.”

He bowed his head slightly. “A true compliment. And the first step on the road to revolution.”

“And now you’re going to take on New York?”

Danielle’s skepticism evidently made him bristle. “Yes,” he said clearly, his gray eyes, their hoods fully retracted, now firmly and unamusedly upon her. “Yes, I am.”





Danielle rode home in the backseat with her eyes shut for most of the way. She opened them periodically to glimpse flashes of the city, the sulfurous lights on the asphalt and the marine sky. “Roger certainly loves to talk,” she said.

“Did he tell you about his novels? Bore you senseless with unwieldy plots?” Moira asked.

“No, scuba diving. And the wine route. Better than that Asian guy.”

“Gary’s new boyfriend? He seemed sweet.”

“Sweet?” John scoffed. “Sweet?”

“He was sweet. No, he really was. But not very interesting.”

There was a silence, during which Danielle longed to ask about Seeley but did not want to seem to care. Of the evening’s underwater blur, Seeley was all that stuck out.

“Did you talk to Ludo at the end?” asked Moira.

“Ludo, is it now?” John said. “My dear, aren’t we grand?”

“Is he really a big deal?” Danielle hoped her voice was neutral. “He seemed a little creepy, or something.”

“He’s moving to New York, you know,” said Moira. “He’s been hired in to launch a mag—they sacked the first guy, you may have read about it. Merton thought his vision was wrong—Billings, was it? Billington? Buxton, I think. Big scandal. Makes Seeley the chosen boy, plucked from halfway across the world. He’s going sometime very soon.”

“Next month,” Danielle said. “I gave him my e-mail. Not that he’ll need it, but in case he’s at a loose end. Trying to be neighborly.”

“That’s a good one,” John said. “Seeley at a loose end. That I’d like to see.”

“Think he’ll succeed?” Danielle asked.

“He thinks so,” said Moira. “In fact, he knows so. But he doesn’t give much away, so it’s hard to know what he’s really plotting. And it’s hard to know whether he’s running to something or running away. He’s made such a splash here in the past, what is it, five years—Christ, he’s only what? Thirty-three? Thirty-five? A baby!—and he’s got a lot of friends—”

“And a lot of enemies,” said John.

“And I just don’t think there’s any challenge for him here anymore, that’s all. But a ton of hassle. With this kind of backing—jeez, Merton’s choice!—he probably reckons he’ll conquer New York, and then the world.”

“Like Kim Jong Il, eh? Or Saddam Hussein?” said John.

“Well, it might not be as easy as he expects,” said Danielle, thinking herself surprisingly witty in spite of the quantities of red wine. “It may just be a case of ‘our chef is very famous in London.’ ”

“That it may,” John said, obviously satisfied at the thought. “That it may.”

chapter two

Bootie, the Professor

Bootie?” Judy Tubb yelled, in her housecoat at the bottom of the stairs, washed in the dull, pearly light of the reflected snow outside. “Bootie, are you going to come down and help dig us out, or what?”

Met by silence, she set a foot upon the creaking step, her hand on the polished wooden ball at the banister’s base, and started, as loudly as she could, to climb. “I said, Bootie? Did you hear me?”

A door opened and her son ambled into view on the gloomy landing, pushing his glasses up his nose and squinting. His old-fashioned brown flannel pyjamas were rumpled around his soft bulk, and his first pre- occupation seemed to be that his mother not catch sight of his pale and generous belly: he clutched at his pyjama strings and hoisted up the bottoms, revealing instead his oddly slender ankles and his long, hairy toes.

“Have you been sleeping all this time, since breakfast?” Judy spoke sharply but felt a burst of tenderness for her befuddled boy, as he wavered before her, almost six feet tall. “Bootie? Frederick? Are you still asleep?”

“Reading, Ma. I was reading in bed.”

“But there’s two feet of snow in the drive, and it’s still coming down.”

“I know.”

“We’ve got to get out, don’t we.”

“School’s cancelled. You don’t have to go anywhere.”

“Just because I don’t have to teach doesn’t mean I don’t need to go anywhere. And what about you?”

Frederick pushed a fist behind his glasses and rubbed his left eye.

“You’re supposed to be looking for a job, aren’t you? You’re not going to find one lying around in bed.”

“There’s a snowstorm on. Everything is cancelled, not just school. There’s nowhere to go today, and no jobs to get today.” He seemed suddenly solid, even stolid, in his bulk. “Besides, my reading isn’t nothing. It’s work, too. Just because it’s not paid doesn’t mean it’s not work.”

“Please, don’t start.”

“Ask Uncle Murray. Don’t you think he spends his days reading?”

“I don’t know what your uncle does with his time, Bootie, but I’d remind you that he’s well paid for it. Very well paid. And I know that when he was your age, he was in college and he had a job. Maybe two jobs, even. Because Pawpaw and Nana couldn’t afford—”

“I know, Ma. I know. I’m going to finish my chapter. And then if it’s stopped snowing, I’ll shovel the drive.”

“Even if it’s still snowing, Bootie. They’ve plowed the road twice since seven.”

“Don’t call me Bootie,” he said as he retreated back into his bedroom. “It’s not my name.”





Judy Tubb and her son lived in a spacious but crumbling Victorian house on the eastern side of Watertown, off the road to Lowville, in a neighborhood of other similarly sprawling, similarly decrepit buildings. Some had been broken up into apartments, and one, at the end of the street, had been abandoned, its elegant windows boarded over and its porch all but caved in; but that was simply the way of Watertown. It was still a good address, a fine house on a fine square lot at the good end of town, as respectable as it had been twenty years before when Bert and Judy had moved in with their little daughter, Sarah, and Bootie not even on the way.

Born a mile from this house, Judy had lived her whole life in town, except for college and a few years teaching in Syracuse. Watertown was to her as invisible as her skin, and she no longer saw (if she ever had) the derelict storefronts and sagging porches. The grand downtown, once known as Garland City, its stone buildings and central plaza constructed on an imperial scale, impressed her only rarely as forlorn: mostly it seemed, as she drove through it to the high school or to the Price Chopper, of a blind and consoling familiarity. So, too, with their neighborhood, their house: she cleaved to them lovingly, simply because they were hers.

The house itself had steep steps at its front, and a small cement patio with a little balcony overhanging, which opened off the upstairs hallway. The Tubbs had had aluminum siding put on in the early eighties—white, simple—but it had grown grubby and mottled with moss and mud, and was in places dented by fallen gutter pipes or bowed by the work of zealous squirrels or birds who had made their nests between the siding and the exterior wall. The remaining wood trim was painted green, but it had been worn bald in spots and was everywhere cracked and peeling. The snow covered the worst of the building’s indignities (including a rotting patch of brick in the foundation), and softened its outlines, so that the peaked roof—once of slate, now of poorly stapled asphalt sheeting—seemed to rise with a solid confidence into the clouded sky.

Inside, the Tubbs’ home was still elegant—except, perhaps, Bootie’s room, a territory to which Judy laid no claim. Little had been done to the rooms in years—she had not had the courage for even a coat of paint since Bert’s death from pancreatic cancer four years before—and they had about them, perhaps in consequence, a heavy, darkened aspect; but she kept the house clean, its wood polished, its linoleum waxed, even its windows (at least in summer, when the storms were taken down) washed. There was little to be done about the stubborn dottings of mold on the basement wall (she blamed the aluminum siding, after all these years, which kept the house from breathing) or in a patch on the blue bathroom lino behind the toilet. But by and large, Judy considered that all was in fine repair, the old cabinets and wide-planked floors, even the small red-and-blue-lozenged stained-glass window over the front door, which she knew—Bert had discovered it; he loved researching such things—had been ordered from a Sears catalogue all the way back at the turn of the last century.

She loved her house, largely though not only for the history that it held, and she was most partial to the upstairs—the grand, bright bedroom overlooking the street that she had shared with her dear husband, and where, were it not for the hospital, he would have died; the broad hall with its balcony and gleaming banisters; even the faded pink flowered carpet along the floor, with its faint smell of dust, which she knew so intimately that she could locate, in her mind, its gnawed edges, its threadbare patches and its irremovable stains. As she moved from that hallway into her beloved bedroom, worrying about her sullen son (it was the age, she kept telling herself, his and the culture’s), she felt she walked into the light: the two large windows cast a shadowless opalescence onto the sprigged wallpaper, the family photos on top of the bureau. Even her discarded stockings, still carrying from yesterday the shape of her solid limbs, appeared outlined in light, luminous. Her hands and her hair, a grayed cloud, had carried up from the kitchen the smell of coffee, and the vents at her ankles pushed a warm wind around the floor. In spite of Bootie, in spite, in spite, in this moment at least, she felt happy: she was not too old to love even the snow.

Judy Tubb made her bed—tidily, smoothing the bottom sheet and removing the stray gray curls from her pillow, then squaring and tucking the top sheet, the mustard wool blanket. She fussed over the bedspread, its evenness on both sides, the plumpness of the pillows beneath its folds. She had no truck with duvets, flimsy and foreign: she liked the weight of a bed made with blankets, and the work of it. She showered, dried, and dressed in the bathroom in the hall—the house was Victorian, and had only the one bathroom in spite of four bedrooms—and emerged in her favorite blush turtleneck beneath the avocado angora cardigan she had knitted last winter. In truth, she had knitted it for her niece, Marina—God only knew why, because they weren’t close; except that she loved to knit and had already made a dozen sweaters for her daughter and her grandkids. But it wasn’t quite finished in time for Christmas, and somehow she had known, when she opened the gift Marina had sent—a crimson velvet scarf with cutaway flowers in it and silk tasseled fringe, like the shawl of a Victorian madam—she had just known that the sweater wasn’t right. She’d sent a Borders gift card instead, and kept the sweater for herself. As for the scarf, there was nowhere in Watertown, New York, that she could wear it—certainly not to teach Geography to the sophomores and juniors at the high school—so she had wrapped it up in tissue and put it in the back of her dresser drawer. The funny thing was, she loved the cardigan as if it had been a precious gift, and she somehow thought of it as a gift from Marina, which made her think more warmly of the girl after all, and which, in a roundabout way, it was.

As she bundled herself into her parka, her Bean boots, her pink woolly toque (also her own handiwork, a pretty lace pattern with a bobble on top), and took, in her mittened hands, the aluminum shovel from the porch, she worried about Bootie, upstairs in his pajamas like a boy. She wouldn’t ask him again to help with the shoveling—he could perfectly well hear the rhythmic scrape and shuffle of her movements from his window overhead—but she hoped against hope that he might come down of his own accord. Of course if he did come, it would mean another day he hadn’t bathed. She didn’t like to nag him about it (who wanted to be that kind of mother, always picking and finding fault?), but she couldn’t remember hearing the tub run once in the past week. He took only baths, not showers, and those rarely; but when he did he lingered an hour in the cooling water, reading one of his infernal books.

Judy Tubb tackled the snow in the driveway first and, in spite of the delicious cold of the shovel through her mittens, in spite of the cold sting pinkening her cheeks, in spite of the satisfying soreness she felt, almost immediately, in her lower back, she felt her good humor evaporating as she thought again about her boy. Her darling and only. Her prize. What was it now? March, it was March now, and almost Easter. And Bootie had graduated almost a year ago, at the top of his class. She’d never imagined he would still be here, or would be back here; and when, in September, he’d gone off to Oswego, she’d thought that it was the beginning of his life in the wider world. No telling what he could accomplish. And if Bert were still alive, he’d see that his youngest had fulfilled the promise, that all the saving (Bert had been an accountant, and wisely parsimonious) had been for something. For Bootie to shine. It was Sarah who’d given them trouble, pregnant at nineteen and married at twenty, but now she had a good job at the savings and loan and three tow-headed, boisterous kids, and her Tom had proven a good husband and settled into his work running Thousand Islands boat tours out of Alexandria Bay in the summer and plowing on a state contract in the winter. Heck, Tom would probably drive down from the bay and shovel out her drive before her own boy stirred himself to help her. He was a good son-in-law, even if she’d hoped, once, for better.

But Bootie: he was going to be a politician, he’d said, or a journalist like his uncle, or maybe a university professor. That’s what the kids had called him at the high school: the professor. He’d been a chubby boy, and bespectacled, but always respected, even admired, in a funny way. He’d been valedictorian. And then home at Christmas with twenty or thirty extra pounds on him and a fistful of incompletes, saying that college was bullshit, or at least Oswego was bullshit, that his teachers were morons and he wouldn’t go back. She suspected a girl, some girl had broken his heart or embarrassed him—he wasn’t easy with girls, not confident—or else his roommates, two tight lunk-headed athletes with beer on the brain; but Bootie wasn’t telling, or not telling her. And since Christmas he’d spent all his time in his room, reading and doing God knew what on the computer (was it pornography? That would be okay, she could understand it in a young boy, but as a distraction, not an obsession; and if only she knew), or in the grand pillared library downtown, where the heat was always too high and the air smelled funny and where, to be honest, he had to order books from out of town to get anything more serious than Harlequin romances or the Encyclopedia Britannica. Had he looked for a job? Not once until last month, when she gave him an ultimatum, told him he’d have to pay rent one way or another, if he wouldn’t go back to school; so that now he made a big show at breakfast with the classifieds, circling factory jobs and short-order cook positions and suggesting—it was the only time he laughed these days—that he could sell used cars at Loudoun’s Ford & Truck, or wait tables at Annie’s off the interstate.

And now here he was on the porch, no gloves, no hat, ski jacket over his pajamas, wielding the second rusty and old shovel, like a weapon, with the steam of his breath fogging his glasses.

Media reviews

“A subtly nuanced, vividly imagined . . . multilayered work of satiric comedy. Set predominantly in Manhattan in the months leading up to, and following, September 11, The Emperor’s Children is Messud’s first American-set novel, as it is her first work of fiction to rapidly shift perspective from chapter to chapter, leaping about, with authorial freedom, among a number of interlocked characters . . . The classic European novel which The Emperor’s Children most resembles is Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale, considered his masterpiece . . . . The Emperor’s Children['s] prevailing tone of crisp, bemused irony [also] suggests the less savage comedies of manners of Alison Lurie, Diane Johnson, and Iris Murdoch . . . How skillful, and how funny, Messud is as a satirist! . . . . Even as she unmasks them, Messud can’t resist evoking sympathy for her mostly foolish, self-deluded characters . . . Bootie is an ideal comic creation. Messud has demonstrated a remarkable imaginative capacity . . . . [This] singular author would seem to exhibit, perhaps more convincingly than James Joyce himself did, those ideal attributes of the artist set forth in Stephan Dedalus’s credo in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . . . . [The Emperor's Children is] a mirror of our foundering times.”
–Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books

“Superb . . . . Within several chapters, the spell of Messud’s unerring, lissome prose is cast . . . . [The] story’s power lies not in what happens to [the characters] but rather, as the book’s epigraph from Anthony Powell avers, in ‘what they think happens to them,’ in the revelation of their carefully nurtured personal myths and what each has at stake in preserving them. With Murray [Thwaite], perhaps the novel’s most marbled character, Messud renders this contradiction with exceptional nuance . . . This–the characters’ consistency in getting themselves wrong–is what makes The Emperor’s Children so richly tragicomic. It’s also what puts Messud’s narrative gifts brilliantly on display. [Messud] writes with the archness of a Muriel Spark, only more subtly and sympathetically wielded . . . Ultimately, most impressive is the way Messud relates 9/11 to her characters’ lives: The public tragedy doesn’t eclipse but rather seeps into and amplifies their private sorrows.”
–Kate Levin, The Nation

“Hilarious . . . That Messud’s book is coming out at this moment suggests that the planets may be aligning to loosen the MFA stranglehold on fiction . . . The Emperor's Children is a disturbingly credible tableau of the sort of people who develop in a cocoon of ambition, entitlement, and pride. Messud has curiosity in spades: Her portraits are done not from photographs, but from life. She is observant and honest . . . [We] have Evelyn Waugh, and, happily, we also have Claire Messud.”
–Stefan Beck, The New Criterion

“In March 2001, while Americans were innocent of greater horrors, uninfected by the virus of fear, a trio of clever, beautiful Brown graduates attempts to conquer Manhattan . . . True to their generation, the friends, now 30, are as economically and professionally arrested as they are culturally blasé. Such is the premise of Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, an exquisite, fully realized novel, which should establish her as one of our finest writers, granting her the audience she richly deserves . . . . Messud is brave enough to make her characters flawed, capable of casual cruelty and overblown gestures, all of which makes them more engaging . . . . By early September, everyone appears at risk of catastrophe. The book escalates in tension, all the more so wrapped in Messud’s elegant prose, as the characters proceed toward what is to come . . . . Her agility with language displays [a] maturity, almost 19th-century in its complexity, that is rare in contemporary fiction. [The] voice and hand are authentic, and she never once loses her way in this glorious work.”
–Karen Heller, Philadelphia Inquirer

“[Messud’s] impeccably fun and thoroughly humane new novel, The Emperor’s Children, has suddenly and deservedly become the literary hit of the season . . . [Messud] has an unerring ear for the way the cultured class talks . . . . [There’s] an intensity to the way [she] wraps things around to the same points again and again . . . [Yet the] cold and thrilling calculation with which Messud dissects [her characters’] sins is balanced at all times by sympathy.”
–Tom Nissley, The Stranger

“Drama–glistening prose, stunning plots, and full-blooded characters. [In] The Emperor’s Children, Messud sets her story for the first time in America, weaving together the lives of three 30somethings at a critical moment in history, a fragment of time in which everything changes forever. The resulting novel is shimmering, hilarious, heartfelt, rooted in place, satiric, ironic, but beyond that, more importantly than that, deeply, deeply human.”
–J. Rentilly, Pages magazine

“The book I’m recommending to all my friends is The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud. It’s an insightful, slyly funny book about a group of 30ish friends trying to forge a life among New York City’s cultural elite.”
–Laurie Muchnick, Newsday Sunday

“Claire Messud’s remarkable new novel The Emperor’s Children is that mythical hybrid: a literary page-turner. In the tradition of Mary McCarthy’s The Group, Messud follows three friends from Brown who have moved to New York City, marking their progress as they make their way in the world. The Emperor’s Children belongs to the robust genre of very-late-coming-of-age novels–among them Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision, Melissa Bank’s Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing, to name a few–where adolescence ends somewhere in one’s 30s. Unlike many of the contemporary books of its ilk, The Emperor’s Children is interested in the ideas behind the frivolous surfaces of urban life. (In many ways, Messud’s commitment to digging beneath those surfaces gives the book the feel of a Jane Austen novel, or even that great classic of very-late-coming-of-age, Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth.) Messud [also] shares Iris Murdoch’s satirical richness, along with her elaborate plotting and fluent, readable prose. There is in The Emperor’s Children the same impression of dense thought, the same psychological precision behind a deceptive ease of narrative that is Murdoch’s signature . . . At the heart of this book isn’t love, but work, which so rarely comes into the late-coming-of-age novel. With each character, she examines the secretly harbored illusions, the grand thoughts that we have about our talents, and how they careen to Earth . . . Another mark of Messud’s originality is that friendship is in many ways a more vivid theme in this book than love. In evoking those lingering college friendships that often form the framework of young city life–their closeness and intricate pathologies–Messud revels in the tiny tensions, and prickly affections, and almost romantic love that exists between friends, especially female friends who have known each other for most of their adult lives. She observes with absolute accuracy the type of intricate, highly refined gossip that takes place in these sorts of circles.”
–Katie Roiphe, Slate.com

“In a world of surface, deeply felt sympathy is hard to come by and hard to put much faith in. The characters in 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 behaviour 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 [in this] . . . glittering, whirling narrative.”
–Alex Clark, The Observer (UK)

“Elegantly written . . . . Messud draws the reader into the neurotic uncertainties and self-absorption of [her characters’] daily lives, with her pellucid prose and clear-eyed but compassionate observations. The personalities of the three characters subtly shift and change as the author switches the point of view between six people . . . This is unmistakably a story about New York, a place where the ultimate tool of seduction is success, and a person’s self-worth stands or falls on how much success one achieves. Messud beautifully captures the uncertainties, kindnesses and betrayals acted out in the playground of the privileged, using the lightest of touches to change what appears to be black and white into subtle shades of grey.”
–Lise Hand, Irish Independent (UK)

“Of all the works that have pored over the terrible events of [9/11], one novel is currently standing out from the crowd: Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, longlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize . . . . In the best tradition of James and Wharton, Messud shows us a world where competing versions of the way to live one’s life fight it out to the bitter end . . . That the characters in The Emperor’s Children do in fact feel like people we know is testament to Messud’s skills. She decided to set her book in New York because ‘it’s a place where almost everybody is from somewhere else,’ a city full of strangers. And, as her novel so eloquently and startlingly shows, sometimes it is strangers who have the greatest impact on our lives.”
–Lesley McDowell, The Scotsman (UK)

“Engrossing . . . As the . . . appealing characters pose and evade the question of what it means to be genuine or false, they draw you in. You’re all theirs–and Messud’s, for as long as this witty and substantial tale lasts.”
People (four stars)

“[A] witty examination of New York’s chattering classes.”
The New Yorker

“Flawlessly drawn . . . . engrossing . . . Messud has 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. 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). 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. Messud is that bold spectator in the crowd willing to shout out that the emperor has no clothes–and neither do his children. Messud’s real audience is broad . . . 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 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.”
–Ron Charles, The Washington Post Book World

“A delicious depiction of tangled lives ‘torn between Big Ideas and a party.’ It has taken five years for Sept. 11, 2001, to receive a novelist’s subtle and satisfying treatment, but it was worth the wait for Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children. Her intimation of the mark the attacks made on the American mind is convincing because in her comedy of manners, as in the nation’s life, that horrific event is, oddly, both pivotal and tangential.”
–George Will, The Washington Post

“Engaging and thought-provoking . . . . the characters take on intriguing nuances as Messud satirizes and challenges perceived notions of culture, class and social mobility. Her vivid, juicy writing ensures an exhilarating read throughout.”
–Elysa Gardner, USA Today

“[A] suspenseful, dark, pitch-perfect comedy of manners and morals . . . The story is structured as a literary fugue, whose voices comprise a trio of Brown University graduates in New York City, all on the cusp of turning 30 . . . . Set in the spring, summer and fall of 2001, The Emperor’s Children can also be considered a work of historical fiction: The reader is expected to open the book knowing that these late twentysomethings, who yearn to be stars in East Coast media and intellectual circles, developed their expectations of entitlement when they reached their majority in the early 1990’s, [an age] of lavish magazine start-ups and ‘renovations’ of older publications . . . . Joyously for the reader, their expectations from life provide a gigantic target for the novelist, who, with grace and formidable expertise at plot-making, one by one dismantles them . . . . [Yet for] all their flaws and bad behavior, one cares about these characters . . . Outstanding.”
–Mindy Aloff, New York Observer

“A masterly comedy of manners–an astute and poignant evocation of hobnobbing glitterati . . . On its surface, a stingingly observant novel about the facades of the chattering class–with its loves, ambitions, and petty betrayals–but it is also, more profoundly, about a wholesale collision of values . . . A penetrating testament to the power of the human imagination . . . A splendid novel . . . A novelist of unnerving talent.”
 –Meghan O’Rourke, New York Times Book Review (cover)

The Emperor’s Children is a robust, canny and surprisingly searching novel [told] with a light-handed irony that is, by turns, as measured as Edith Wharton’s and as cutting as Tom Wolfe’s. [Messud is] an elegant, serious writer who can interweave intimate stories of individuals with wider considerations, both political and philosophical . . . In The Emperor's Children, Messud . . . creat[es] a delicious social satire about a small group of navel-gazing New York intellectuals (and their romantic and social shenanigans) on the eve of the end of the world as we knew it. Here, she shows us how history does and does not change us, how character is borne helplessly forward by external events while remaining stubbornly true to itself. This intractability is her characters’ strength as well as their often hilarious–and ultimately sad–burden . . . Their self-importance, their social swagger, their intellectual gamesmanship are all drawn with satiric gusto, as Messud makes clever entertainment of her characters’ parries and thrusts . . . The trouble that ensues is marvelously orchestrated and achieved with vivid winking humor, as Messud both skewers and loves her characters so that we may do the same . . . She conveys the landscape with precision and dead-on emotional accuracy . . . [Messud] is [a] keen observer of character and the world at large . . . [She] seems to be telling us that we must have our myths; we can’t do otherwise and exist. They are our strength and our folly. And folly, as she so dazzlingly demonstrates, is the stuff that reveals us in all our hilarious, pathetic and, yes, sometimes even heroic glory.”
–Marisa Silver, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“[A] big, readable, ambitious contemporary comedy of manners.”
–Michelle Huneven, LA Weekly

“The aspiring young people in The Emperor’s Children, are each looking, in different ways, for fame, love and excitement. All are desperately eager not to be taken for ‘ordinary.’ The result is an extraordinary novel . . . Messud weaves her storylines together ingeniously, portraying her characters with a shrewd perceptiveness and making their fates seem, for much of the novel, suspensefully uncertain and, by the end, morally illuminating and surprising. Her distinctive prose style reminds one of an updated Henry James . . . Ms. Messud has composed a comedy of manners, a satire on journalism and misplaced ambition, and a probing, poignant, drama about confused urban lives.”
–Merle Rubin, The Wall Street Journal

“A splendidly entertaining achievement . . . a strikingly good story about family and betrayal, truth and ambition, fidelity and desire . . . Messud’s writing is captivating. She has broad powers of embrace, catching emotion in mid-flight and giving us the feel of thought rather than the usual thoughts about feeling that many writers deliver . . . One of the slyest, most intelligent and entertaining novels of the year.”
–Alan Cheuse, San Francisco Chronicle

“Messud is a remarkably gifted novelist, blessed with enormous poise, authority and emotional insight. Set in New York City on the eve of 9/11, [The Emperor’s Children is] about three college classmates, now on the cusp of their 30’s, trying to sort out questions about love, work and commitment . . . inhabit[ing] the margins of Manhattan’s literary-media-arts world [and] uncertain how to balance the equation between moral seriousness and success, earnestness and irony. Messud delineates this world with quick, sure, painterly strokes . . . [She] does a nimble, quicksilver job of portraying her characters from within and without–showing us their pretensions, frailties and self-delusions, even as she delineates their secret yearnings and fears . . . [She] uses their stories to explore questions about how an individual hammers out an identity 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. Messud shift[s] gears effortlessly between the comic and the tragic, the satiric and the humane.”
–Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Engaging . . . At its finest, social comedy promises a soft landing without utterly turning its back on the world. Irony bumping into realism, in other words, and in Claire Messud’s case, a bit of Jane Austen bumping into Tom Wolfe. The Emperor’s Children is a big ol’ New York novel--more particularly, a Manhattan novel, concentrating on the echelons of power and hipness. The setup is delicious . . . In her group portrait of young privileged friends from Brown she has devised a wicked way to penetrate the realms of journalism and publishing and liberals in wolves’ clothing . . . . . . Messud's perspective is fierce but unbiased . . . . She is a literary writer both brainy and deep . . . her eye is keen for the elaborate tableau she’s constructed . . . The Emperor’s Children is funny and captivating.”
–Gail Caldwell, Boston Sunday Globe

“Like a latter-day Edith Wharton, Claire Messud, in her sparkling new novel, has given us a story of striving young Manhattanites, a confident turn from a writer whose work has always been impressive, if never quite this much fun . . . Richly imagined and occasionally wicked . . . This is New York captured with the sharp focus of a local.”
–Taylor Antrim, Vogue

“As if to flaunt her uncanny understanding of human nature, Claire Messud fleshes out the personalities of her characters so thoroughly and authentically [that] it is nearly impossible to imagine that they don’t really exist. Add to that the book’s setting–New York City in 2001, with historical events and pop-culture references accurately in place–and the story comes alive with astounding vividness . . . Messud’s writing is poetic, her insights spot-on . . . [It] is heartening to read words that so skillfully capture the city, the time and such wonderfully textured people.”
–Kate Lowenstein, Time Out New York

“A gripping story of clashing ambitions, compromised loyalties, and the love/hate relationship between the powerless and the powerful. As the characters hurl toward that terrible September day, the narrative goes beyond social satire, deepening into a hypnotic, moving read.”
–Sara Eckel, The Village Voice

“The narrative point-of-view shifts freely among five characters, each reflecting on the others, alternately judging or absolving, and sometimes loving–which may, in the end, amount to the same thing. [Messud] paints them with color and detail and considerable skill. The pleasures of Messud’s prose are enlivening. She turns a very elegant phrase . . . The most incidental of [her] descriptions are fresh and vivid . . . Messud wisely avoids describing the event [9/11] itself, but it has powerful reverberations for the characters and the plot. The tragedy does not offer neat redemption for anyone–each is still flawed, in his or her own way. But it does reveal how history, unexpected and irresistible, can alter lives and move us forward . . . The pulse of real life [is] on every page of The Emperor's Children.”
–Tom Beer, Newsday

“Absorbingly intelligent . . . Sure-handed . . . [The Emperor’s Children centers around] three privileged college chums who hover on the outskirts of New York intelligentsia in 2001. Months before Sept. 11, they are all questioning their choices and life goals . . . [and as] the year progresses toward fall, [their] lives take a darker turn . . . The characters are terrifically rendered . . . Messud is adroit at handling their insecurities and inner emotions . . . and her exploration of entitlement is both witty and astute.”
–Yvonne Zipp, The Christian Science Monitor


“Delightful . . . [The Emperor’s Children] impressively explores entitlement and waning youth.”
–Gilbert Cruz, Entertainment Weekly

“Wonderful . . . fat, delicious, and very smart . . . With her own beefy degrees from Yale and Cambridge, [and] her award nominations for her previous books, Messud is clearly of the culturally elite world she writes about. But happily, she is not bound by it. She has thoughtfully overlaid this big, character-driven novel of how some of us live today with a deeply informed echoing of literary history. Rather than showing off her education by writing a flashy meta-novel about everything and nothing, Messud reaches into her literary kit-bag and reworks classic dilemmas and characters via the novels of Wharton, Fitzgerald, and Waugh, to name a few. She complicates those archetypes by unwinding the illusions that wrap her characters in a sense of superiority. By the end of this tale, the emperor’s children have no clothes, although one holdout, at least, remains blind to the naked truth . . . A lot of the pleasure of reading The Emperor's Children derives from its language, which entertains because of its droll precision . . . Superb.”
–Maureen Corrigan, NPR/Fresh Air

“Riveting . . . . A cheeky exposé of the pundit class in all its privileged splendor. Messud’s insights are nuanced enough that her flawed luminaries survive as more than mere types, and even minor characters make their mark. Messud extracts considerable suspense from the young cultural pretenders’ attempts to topple the old guard . . . . An excellent read.”
The Atlantic Monthly

“Soft-spoken and worldly-wise beyond her years, Claire Messud has been praised for her precisely crafted, sharply intelligent fictions–her novels of manners have manners. [But] Messud’s ambitious, glamorous, and gutsy new novel, The Emperor’s Children, is a leap forward, a marvel of bold momentum and kinetic imagination. The story propels the tangled lives of a set of thirtyish Manhattanites right toward the historic fissure that ushered in 21st century America.”
Elle

“Known for her acuity in examining life’s profound issues through intellectually probing and nuanced prose, Messud now evinces a higher level of sophistication in this darkly symbolic and satiric examination of the culturally enclosed world of today’s East Coast media cognoscenti . . . Tangy dialogue, provocative asides [and] glittering imagery build toward an electrifying conclusion.”
–Carol Haggas, Booklist

“Pitch-perfect, utterly irresistible . . . [Messud] strikes gold. [A] tightly knit web–a kind of mini-panorama of New York society–is at the heart of Messud’s rather ingenious craft. The characters are all extraordinarily drawn . . . Stepping elegantly through the varieties of irony, Messud lifts superficially superficial characters out of the trivial; she endows them with tender complexity and then rips the carpet out from under their poor feet . . . . [Their] ambitions may be petty, but Messud’s perspective on them is calibrated and so achingly real . . . Sit back and watch Messud, who takes care of [them] with style and zeal.”
–Minna Proctor, Bookforum

“Messud’s gracefully written new novel, [with] prose reminiscent of Henry James, focuses on the moral dilemmas of a group of affluent young New York professionals, and the shocks delivered to their complacent self-belief by acts of personal and political violence.”
The Independent (UK)

“[The Emperor’s Children] carries a lot of weight: five fully developed, emotionally complex characters; a glittering city, described from the perspective of blasé insiders and from the viewpoint of those newly arrived and lonely; a historic calamity; an audaciously acknowledged pantheon of literary models that includes not only the Russians but also William Empson, the James brothers, Musil, the Book of Genesis and Napoleon’s journal. It is a heavy load, but Messud’s book is so broadly based, so resiliently humorous that it easily sustains it . . . . Messud is satirically observant of the surfaces of the modern city. She is funny and wonderfully awake to the comedy of misunderstanding . . . As large-hearted as it is ambitious, this is a novel that combines the old-fashioned art of storytelling with a clear-eyed view of the modern world.”
The Sunday Times (UK)

“The status of truth is one of the concerns running cleverly through Messud’s new novel . . . [Messud is] attracted to the way fiction can explore existential questions, exposing the gaps between one person’s view of themselves in the world and another’s. The effect can be comic or satirical, and is often bracingly bleak . . . . [Yet] Messud does not invite us to judge the compelling characters who people her masterful novel, but to acknowledge that the truth can be overrated, and the myths by which we live more precious than we know.”
–Ruth Scurr, Times Literary Supplement (UK)

“Wolfi-ian chronicle of three Manhattanites who are all searching for the meaning of life. Spry and interesting.”
Tatler Magazine (UK)

“Set after the turn of the millennium, The Emperor’s Children follows the lives of three 30-year-old friends as they strive to carve out a meaningful future. Focusing on their struggles to find authenticity and value in the pressured environment of Manhattan, Claire Messud’s latest novel will strike a chord with all who feel caught up in the rat race.”
In Style (UK)

“Wonderfully absorbing . . . head and shoulders above the others [on the Booker longlist].”
–Alex Clark, Observer (UK)

“Claire Messud’s civilised prose has been attracting respect on both sides of the Atlantic.”
–Claire Armistead, The Guardian (UK)

“[A] book of dazzling reach . . . Messud [writes] with precision, humour and loveliness.”
–Gaby Wood, The Observer (UK)

“[A] great achievement. Claire Messud's new novel will make her name  . . . intelligent and unsparing . . . The Emperor's Children is likely to be one of the most talked-about novels of the Autumn. Buy two copies; give one to a friend.”
The Economist

“Delightful . . . The Emperor’s Children [is] distinctive [because of] the author’s uncompromising regard for the truth. [It is] a work of fiction, but one that rings true. Messud’s portrayal of New York is spot-on. Her diction is precise and her characters wryly observant.”
–Andrea Katz, The Financial Times (UK)

“A rare gem . . . Surprising . . . Luminously intelligent . . . In its scope, style and substance, The Emperor’s Children is an attempt to return the novel to its golden age; it is engaged in a conversation with George Eliot, Henry James, Dostoevsky. Its psychological realism is perfect, its characters thrillingly real, alive and utterly convincing. Messud’s prose is a timely and intensely pleasurable reminder of the possibilities of the English language. To use the word clarity about her style is to return the word to its origins; this is style as illumination, shining a searching yet sympathetic light on the minds and inner worlds of her characters, and as a radiant mode of moral inquiry.”
–Neel Mukherjee, The Sunday Times (UK)

“A stinging portrait of life among Manhattan’s junior glitterati, [including] three best friends [who], a decade after they met at Brown, are finding it hard to be 30. . . . Messud deftly paints the neurotic uncertainties of people who know they're privileged and feel sorry for themselves anyway; she makes her characters human . . . Intelligent, evocative and unsparing.”
Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“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.”
Publishers Weekly, starred review




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