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270 of 333 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
The Emperor's Children Have No Clothes!, December 3, 2006
Since many reviewers have discussed the story line in detail, I will stick with my overall impressions of what I consider an extremely over hyped disappointing read.
In my opinion, none of the main characters are anywhere near as adorable as the author keeps insisting they are. Their most notable characteristic is a non-stop (and rather interchangeable) flow of campy repartee that might convey intellect, success, pretension, heartbreak, or whatever to someone steeped in their milieu but which kept me at a considerable emotional distance. The doomed idol, Murray Thwaite, in particular is dreadfully flimsy - is this the author's dream of an articulate, handsome, talented, unattainable (for others who wish to be him) Golden Boy. This sort of wish fulfillment at the reader's expense is simply unpalatable to the serious consumer. And, if this was to be a tongue in cheek attempt at humor, it fell far short of the mark.
I agree with other reviewers. It appears the author likes very long sentences; many paragraphs are absolutely incomprehensible. Are we to be impressed with the overuse of commas and dependent clauses so that it often takes two or three readings to render a sentence understandable? If this is the new era of grown-up writing, I'll stick to my mysteries and nonfiction.
But, I kept at it hoping that Messud would indeed pull it off in the end; however, the ending too was quite unsatisfactory. And, the use of the 9/11 tragedy to try to wrap it up is unforgivable. If so many New Yorkers of this age group truly were so wrapped in their own petty self-absorptions during this time period, God save our country. Could any of the characters see outside their own small contrived world? It would appear not. I won't be reading any more of Messud's work.
If you're hoping for a plot, forget it. You can just read a page and sit back and admire Messud's gift for metaphor, prose and description. But plot and character development are as thin as deli cheese and just about as smelly. It's sadly true, but all of these characters stink, for one reason or another.
Do yourself a favor, don't buy the book. If you've read the hype and still think it's worth it, check it out from a library or borrow a copy. In fact, let me know, I'll send you mine. The only thing it's good for is keeping coffee rings off my desk.
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31 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
The plot that wouldn't thicken, March 5, 2007
You've really got to worry about a novel when a *favourable* reviewer describes the plot's two main set pieces and one of them is when the cat dies. [The Economist, 19 Aug 2006.] Before getting into that, however, try this sample sentence for size:
"He remembered his father's telling him - his father, small as he was himself tall, with sloping shoulders off which Murray feared, as a child, the braces might slip, a bow-tied little man with an almost Hitlerian mustache, softened from menace by its grayness, and by the softness, insidious softness, of his quiet voice, a softness that belied his rigidity and tireless industry, his humorless and ultimately charmless 'goodness' (Why had she married him? She'd been so beautiful, and such fun) - telling him, as he deliberated on his path at Harvard, to choose accounting, or economics, saying, with that dreaded certainty, 'You see, Murray, I know you want to go out and write books or something like that. But only geniuses can be writers, Murray, and frankly son ...'"
[p. 124]
See what I mean about size? Reviewers have already complained about the author's self-interrupting, drunkenly digressive prose style. They are entirely correct to do so. Claire Messud's book is festooned with sentences which are essentially motorway pile-ups of sub-clauses, codicils and parenthetical interpolations. Such a rookie mistake - which makes for hopelessly cumbersome reading - should never have made it past the editor.
The Emperor's Children concerns the lives of Danielle, Marina and Julius, three thirtysomething New York literati and their patriarch, the essayist Murray Thwaite, Marina's father. Onto this scene arrive two more brains: Ludovic Seeley is a viperish and talented journalist from Australia who has come to NY to launch a new magazine; and Bootie Tubb is Thwaite's bookish college-drop-out nephew, who has taken up residence (and employment) at his uncle's home. In summary, all six of Ms. Messud's characters are part of a literary intelligentsia. So she's a writer writing about writers. Which is what bad writers shorn of ideas always do (think Stephen King). With such lack of variety among its dramatis personae, one is left to wonder how the book's jacket can make the breathtaking claim to be about 'the way we live in this moment'. Does Ms. Messud presume that the ruminations of six Manhattanites parked in front of their word processors will have something to say to ambulance drivers? Surfers? Teenagers? I like to write occasionally, and even I quickly grew tired of these navel-gazers. Perhaps the cruel joke Ms. Messud has played on herself is that only self-absorbed people presume that all others are like them, and will therefore relate to self-absorbed characters.
Anyway, the praxis of the book is set in motion by nothing more original than Seeley's aim to expose Thwaite as an intellectual fraud of some sort. Once this rather abstract goal is announced, nothing at all happens. We sit around for several hundred pages awaiting the unmasking. It never happens. (The cat has died some time before, its passing memorialised with an entire chapter.) The life of the mind is an indolent one, and so the time must thus be passed with sex. Danielle has an affair with Seeley; Seeley has an affair with Marina; and - ridiculously - Thwaite has an affair with Danielle. Ms. Messud also finds time to go into the details of Julius's gay love life with tiresomely squeamish prurience - beneath the willfully nonchalant prose one can sense a novelist delighted by her own daring.
There are silly mistakes. Since Bootie quickly becomes disillusioned with his uncle and correspondingly determined to expose him, he essentially clones Seeley's role: the reader is now left wondering why we now have two characters doing the same thing. As for Seeley himself, he inexplicably marries the daughter of the man he wants to destroy - a bit socially awkward, that. If Bootie is so precociously well-read, why does he seem surprised to discover that Ireland is divided? But perhaps his ignorance reflects that of his creator, who incorrectly informs us that Ireland has 'a border in the middle' [p. 186]. (The border is in the north-east corner, partitions off only one-fifth of the island, and never reaches the west coast.) Messud writes that Thwaite 'blew smoke though his nose like a dragon' [p. 305], forgetting that this is now her third time using that expression.
There's intellectual spivvery. So much literary name-dropping goes on, but it all consists of obvious choices. Situations are repeatedly described as 'Beckettian'; Bootie is reading Tolstoy, Melville and Emerson ... but there's nothing in these references to indicate that Messud has done any more that *hear about* these writers. It's all paper-thin. And the ambitious Seeley's inspiration is ... Napoleon.
Suddenly, September 11 irrupts into the plot. Our flawed-but-lovable characters respond in their various ways: Seeley grieves copiously for the new magazine he was about to launch but now never will; Thwaite's wife gets her hair done; Bootie changes his name to an even sillier one and inexplicably disappears (and not before time, some readers might may say). So if this intrusion of a harsh and savage reality has no effect on our characters, why was it mentioned at all? To rob from real life a luridly exciting climax that the author hadn't the talent to create herself?
It's plain from the 'way we live now' claim that the book is trying to boldly capture the Zeitgeist, but the entire plot takes place in the minds of its characters, and the space in which they move is thus correspondingly constricted. The novel feels not so much like it's taking place in an era as in one rather stuffy, overpriced apartment.
I have found that there is a yawning gulf of difference between the public response to this book and the critical one. A while back I listened to two members of the New York literary intelligentsia (Stephen Metcalf, Katie Roiphe) being interviewed about the novel on Slate. Surprise, surprise: they both liked it. Metcalf even did some name-dropping of his own: Edith Wharton, Zadie Smith, David Lodge we all parachuted in. But even the comparisons he meant unkindly were too flattering.
Thus the literati peer deeply into the Emperor's Children's subtext, apparently unable to say the plain truth currently being howled by readers in general (and there for all to see): the book is a poor read and it has little to say.
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20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
a good book not without a fault, December 22, 2006
"The Emperor's Children" were recommended to me by several people, I was also very encouraged by the reviews. Maybe because of my high expectations I was a bit disappointed after having read this novel. I guess I thought that it would be an absolute masterpiece, that it would leave me breathless. Nothing of that sort.
However, I do think that Claire Messud wrote a very decent book. First of all, it is extremely engrossing and it is hard to stop reading before the end. I am not sure if this is a characteristic of a great novel, but it is certainly positive.
The book starts very slowly and continues at a rather slow pace - important events come without being specially stressed or prepared. The structure of the novel adds to this impression - it is narrated month by month, throughout 2001, skipping some days and stretching the others.
There are only a few, meticulously described characters and the (long) beginning of the book is devoted mainly to development of their psychological portraits. We start with meeting Danielle, a TV reporter (well, more or less everyone here, with a few exceptions, works or wants to work in journalism, perhaps in a broad sense of the word), who spends her last night at a party in Australia, where she was gathering material to the TV program. Before flying home, she meets fascinating Ludovic Seeley, an Australian, who is going to start a new magazine, called "The Monitor" in New York City.
The other main characters are Julius, a gay writer with a lot of love problems, and Marina, a beautiful, spoiled daughter of a famous journalist, Murray Thwaite.
Danielle, Marina and Julius are all thirty, friends from college (Brown), and live in New York City, which is the setting of this novel. Otherwise, they are very different. Danielle, a daughter of divorced parents from Ohio, is a perfectionist, who treats life and her career seriously, her goals are precise, but she also dreams of a perfect love (which, obviously, predestines her for a failure in this field). Julius, a son of a Vietnam veteran and his wife brought from the war, is also dreaming of love, career and being a socialite, which seems to be unattainable, because of the contradictions in his own personality. Marina, who seems not to have grown up (probably because of being in the shadow of her father and, at the same time, being overprotected by her rich, sophisticated parents, is supposed to write a book about children's clothes and is stuck. Until, through Danielle, she meets Ludovic. Then she moves on with the book, but gets stuck in other ways in her life...
The other crucial character is Frederic, a.k.a. Bootie, a nephew of Murray Thwaite, who lives with his mother in Watertown, upstate NY, and dropped out of college because of his disgust for hypocrisy of students and incompetence of teachers. He is generally disappointed with people, and wants to educate himself. He decides to go to New York and get advice from Murray, his idol.
I was surprised by the 9/11 events appearing here (again) but they are shown at a special angle although it was exploited, to a varying extent, by many authors, very well, for example, by Ian McEwan in "Saturday" (and to be exploited for many years to come, I am sure). Messud used it to show the selfishness of her characters, their own petty concerns, their worries at that time, and. At the end, I was quite interested in the light she gave to that day. Especially for Bootie, 9/11 was a special day...
Long sentences? Please... I think only American readers can complain about this. Complexity of the prose has never made books popular bestsellers, I am sure (look at Faulkner, Joyce, Proust, or closer, at Pynchon for example - I am not saying that Messud compares to any of them, but certainly the length of sentences is not a problem here). Maybe it is true, what has been said of this book, that it would be praised by the critics, but not by the readers... For me, the problem is rather the ending and generally the development of the plot. The characters I did not see as created to be likeable, they seem to be rather caricatures, personalize certain stereotypes, at the same time not lacking in perfectly human, individual duplicity (especially Murray Thwaite, as a two-faced role model, or Bootie, a ridiculous contemporary rebel), although, I have to admit, the style of writing is such as it is not obvious if the narrator (author?) admires snobbery to some extent, or all of it is a satire on American lifestyles.
Generally, this is a good book. It reads well, and it makes one think. It just lacks depth in the plot, and disappointed me a bit, as I said at the beginning, most likely because I expected too much. And, of course, it means I agree with other reviewers that it is overhyped. But it does not mean it lacks value or should be condemned.
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