Reviews
"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 pretensionsintellectual, 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(May 8, 2006), "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 Childrenis 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 whichThe Emperor's Childrenmost resembles is Flaubert'sL'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 inA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. . . . [The Emperor's Childrenis] 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 . . . Thisthe characters' consistency in getting themselves wrongis what makesThe Emperor's Childrenso 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 Childrenis 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'sThe 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 ch, "Messud, in her fourth novel, remains wickedly observant of pretensionsintellectual, 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(May 8, 2006), "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 readingThe Emperor's Childrenderives from its language, which entertains because of its droll precision . . . Superb." Maureen Corrigan,NPR/Fresh Air, (August 15, 2006) "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 fictionsher 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 "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 pretensionsintellectual, 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, "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 theirsand 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 ofThe 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 clothesand 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'sThe 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 Childrencan 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 . . . . Joyou, "A masterly comedy of mannersan astute and poignant evocation of hobnobbing glitterati . . . On its surface, a stingingly observant novel about the facades of the chattering classwith its loves, ambitions, and petty betrayalsbut 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 Childrenis 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 hilariousand ultimately sadburden . . . 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 inThe 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 t
