Claire Messud, the author of PEN/Faulkner Award finalists When the World Was Steady (1995), a novel, and The Hunters (2001), a collection of novellas, delivers a powerful, stylistically complex narrative that explores New York society from the inside out. More than one critic compared Messud's prose to that of Henry James, American modernist and novelist of manners at the turn of the last century. The technique translates well into fiction that uses the last days of relative innocence before 9/11 and the chaotic immediate aftermath as its backdrop. The novel's texture, multiple layers digging deep beneath and exposing society in such captivating detail, comes from Messud's ability to create dramatic tension even while writing pointed social satire.Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
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 overtly satiric examination of the culturally enclosed world of today's East Coast media cognoscenti. At its core is celebrated liberal journalist Murray Thwaite, an outspoken pundit used to his fair share of public adulation and abjuration. Reverence and revilement, however, are now coming from sources much closer to home. His adored and adoring 30-year-old daughter, Marina, and her best friend, Danielle, an independent TV producer, may be firmly in Murray's camp, but they are outflanked by Ludovic Seeley, an Australian magazine publisher soon to be Murray's son-in-law, and Bootie Tubb, Murray's callow, idealistic 19-year-old nephew--two men intent on exposing Murray's personal and professional hypocrisies. Ambitious and egocentric, naive yet urbane, Murray and his circle behave with a tenuous frivolity born of their exalted sense of self-worth. Comparisons to Zadie Smith's On Beauty (2005) are inevitable, yet Messud's courageous exploration of this societal microcosm is less ardent and more artful. Tangy dialogue, provocative asides, glittering imagery, and nimble postulations build toward an electrifying and edifying conclusion. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
About the Author
Claire Messud’s first novel, When the World Was Steady, and her book of novellas, The Hunters, were finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award; her second novel, The Last Life, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and an Editor’s Choice at The Village Voice. All three books were New York Times Notable Books of the Year. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Radcliffe Fellowship, and is the current recipient of the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.
From The Washington Post
We've all caught glimpses of them before, but Claire Messud has captured and 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. The three wunderkinds at the center of Messud's engrossing satire are friends from Brown, strutting through life with élan but also with a sense of floundering that chafes at them like a new pair of Christian Louboutin shoes. Julius Clarke, a freelance critic for the Village Voice, is "aware that at thirty he stretched the limits of the charming wastrel, that some actual sustained endeavor might be in order were he not to fade, wisplike, away." Danielle Minkoff works as a producer of documentary films, but she's not having any luck selling her ideas (the Australian revolution? liposuction malpractice?). Marina Thwaite, the gorgeous daughter of a celebrity journalist, is one of the "it" girls of New York, but she's never actually done anything. A job, she tells her father, would "make me ordinary, like everybody else." For several years, she's maintained the illusion of purpose by procrastinating on a vacuous work of cultural criticism about the history of children's clothing. Having spent her advance and outlasted three editors, she's fallen into paralysis.
Yes, they're spoiled, they're self-absorbed, and they're whiny, but above all else they're irresistibly clever and endowed with the kind of hyper-analytical minds that make them fascinating critics of each other and themselves.
We join this flawlessly drawn triangle just before the arrival of Marina's flabby cousin, Bootie, from Watertown, N.Y., light years away from the glamour of Manhattan. Antisocial and self-righteous, Bootie has dropped out of college ("full of jabbering fools") to pursue his own program of reading and radical self-reliance. Having long admired Marina's famous father from afar, he drives to New York City to see him, clutching a copy of Emerson's essays. Messud has perfected a narrative voice that simultaneously reveals her characters' thoughts and mocks them. "Like Una in The Faerie Queene," she writes, "Bootie, too, needed to discern the route to wisdom. He was, he decided, like a pilgrim in the old days, a pilgrim in search of knowledge."
Marina's father, 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). "Integrity is everything, it's all you've got" he tells a young journalism student he hopes to sleep with. "If you have a voice, a gift, you're morally bound to exploit it." 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. Murray is only too eager to welcome Bootie into his home: "My amanuensis," he announces, "like Pound and Yeats." But Bootie, the pompous rube, is too naive, too childish to see his hero up close without suffering the kind of disillusionment that inspires vengeance.
Beneath the rich surface of this comedy of manners runs Messud's attention to "authenticity": its importance, its elusiveness and the myriad tricks of self-delusion we pursue to imagine we possess it in greater degree than our friends and family. Marina and her gang think they'll shake the world awake and then conquer it with their disruptive candor, but, smart as they are, they're too trapped in the bubble of their own vanity. Messud is that bold spectator in the crowd willing to shout out that the emperor has no clothes -- and neither do his children.
A number of gifted young people in New York will luxuriate in the masochistic pleasure of reading this novel. (Their indulgent parents -- skewered here, too -- may find it somewhat less enjoyable.) Messud's real audience, though, is broader, 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 disaster that concludes the novel isn't particularly surprising -- we're in New York City, 2001, after all -- and neither is the fact that these characters, except for Bootie, emerge from the terrorist assaults essentially unaffected. That may be Messud's most damning comment on these entitled young people. They're inert, suspended between great expectations and a desperate fear of failure. As the joys of adolescence grow more impossible to retain, adulthood presses on them like something terminal.
Late in the book Danielle wonders if growing up is "a process of growing away from mirth, as if, like an amphibian, one ceased to breathe in the same way: laughter, once vital sustenance, protean relief and all that made isolation and struggle and fear bearable was replaced by the stolid matter of stability. . . . Where there had been laughter, there came a cold breeze."
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.
Reviewed by Ron Charles
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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 nove...
