Review

The Emperor's Children

By Claire Messud

Published by Picador

Has enough time passed since the attack on New York’s World Trade Center for us to make sense of the event in fiction?

Some authors have used the outrage in an explicit way – John Updike with Terrorist; Jay McInerney with The Good Life – but Claire Messud has chosen to use it as a coda to her story of troubled thirtysomethings and their relationships in Manhattan.

At the core of the book lies the friendship between three college friends. Marina is the father of successful, bullish, social and political commentator Murray Thwaite, a survivor of the sixties now lauded for his every declaration. Marina, still in the shadow of her father, is struggling to finish a book in which she has lost interest and has moved back to live with her parents in their beautiful apartment.

Her friends are Julius, for whom the initial golden promise of his career in journalism has stalled, and Danielle, a documentary film producer in search of a subject. So far, none of them have been successful in love.

Danielle’s chance introduction to the sneering yet charming Ludovic Seeley, and the unexpected arrival in New York of Murray’s overweight, socially inept nephew Bootie, set in motion a chain of events that will test the bonds between the friends and bring new seriousness to their lives.

While it is true that for some people reading novels about well-off east coast yuppies moaning into their caviar about how awful life is may sound about as appealing as drinking warm cava, Messud brings to her characters a depth which transcends her storyline. Murray Thwaite, for all his bombast, is at heart an old-fashioned rebel seeking to tell the truth as he sees it; the odious Seeley despises him as an establishment figure; the three friends struggle with issues common to many 21st-century citydwellers of their age.

But the dark heart of the book is undoubtedly Bootie, a lonely young man in search of the truth about life and learning, free of institutional endorsement. Crushed to discover that the man he idolises has feet of clay, Bootie’s decline is swift, but his desire for revenge is undimmed.

Make no mistake, The Emperor’s Children is a page-turner extraordinaire, but its crisp dialogue and beautiful turn of phrase give it a shine beyond what is usually meant by the term.

Reviewed by James Smith, Booktrust website editor

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