Michigan's Missing Glove

Officially Unofficial Review of The Emperor’s Children – Claire Messud

I’m not sure whether I want to thank Claire Messud for a wonderful read or to ask her for that week of my life back, so I can go ahead and start The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo several years too late. Such is my ambivalent, love/hate relationship with NY Times award-winning novel The Emperor’s Children.

I heard Ms. Messud give a reading from the novel at UVA this past fall, so I knew what I was getting myself into. In fact, I asked for the book, which centers on the lives of three thirty-something friends living aristocratic New Yorker lives in the months leading up to and following the 9/11 tragedy, for my birthday. These three friends – media heiress Marina Thwaite, sassy gay friend Julius Clarke, and sarcastic but reserved Danielle Minkoff – and their supporting cast of characters were the kinds of snobbish socialites I love to hate. There were moments where I certainly sympathized with the characters – especially with poor Julius, when his relationship with a closeted yuppie takes a horrifying turn for the worst – but for the most part, I kept turning the pages to watch them suffer because of their small-potatoes crises. (A social comedy which, by the way, I’m certain Messud intended her readers to feel. At the reading, her voice tinged with sarcasm any time daddy’s girl Marina didn’t get her way.)

My ambivalent feelings towards the novel extend past the characters and into Messud’s writing style. I’m certainly guilty of being more Dickens than Hemingway in my sentence patterns, so for the most part, I welcomed Messud’s labyrinthine sentences. At times, though, her interjecting hyphenated and/or parenthetical statements overstepped the bounds of stream-of-consciousness or scene detail to walk into the Land of Just Plain Unnecessary. For example:

“How could Danielle ever explain to anyone how distinct her relationship with Murray was, how separate, and yet – so swiftly – how intense? Through their correspondence – tentative but revelatory, never inappropriate – and then over drinks (twice), lunch (once), and (most fatefully) supper, she’d come to know him by that last day of May, that star-filled evening of supreme calm, in which he walked with her from the restaurant on Cornelia Street back up to her building and asked, as ever with great ease, as if nothing could be more natural, if he might come up (and, she noted, without pretext: he didn’t say “for coffee,” or “to see the view” or “to pick up that book I loaned you,” which he might have; by which she further knew him, she felt, for a fundamentally honest man) – by then, in so short a space of time, she considered that their connection was almost eerie, a meeting of minds, a Platonic reunion of divided souls” (Messud 229).

(Wow.)

In this and other instances, I had to return to the portion of the sentence before the interjection(s?) to see what thought exactly I was trying to follow.

The only aspects of the novel I took unadulterated issue with were Danielle’s plot arc and how Messud added the World Trade Center tragedy into her narrative. Marina and Julius have their own dynamic storylines: she is trying, with however aggravating a sense of entitlement, to step out of her father Murray Thwaite’s journalistic shadow; he is on a self-destructive pattern involving an oppressively jealous boyfriend. Danielle, however, serves as a mere appendix to the Thwaite family saga. Her work life – she is the only one of the three who holds a steady job – is shunted to one side while she acts as Marina’s sidekick and becomes one of Murray’s extramarital conquests. Then, in a move that suggests Messud or her editor or both realized these things, Danielle suffers a bout of depression when Murray leaves her to watch the World Trade Center collapse from her downtown picture window as he goes back to his wife and, in a melodramatic and therefore unbelievable moment, attempts suicide by pill overdose. It’s within this plot arc that Messud most directly addresses 9/11, and even then one can tell it was added out of necessity when she picked up writing the novel again in 2003, after putting it down when the national tragedy first happened. (Nevertheless, I do commend Claire Messud for having the stones to write about such a grave event so soon after it occurred. Kudos; I know I couldn’t have done it anywhere near so well or so tactfully.)

Despite the minor annoyances the book presented, there were characters and plot lines that intrigued me, like Marina’s unstable cousin “Bootie” and her slimy Australian love interest Ludovic Seeley (I immediately thought of Simon Baker). Messud’s tendency towards the literary and towards the presentation of ideas bigger than her petty characters save this book from being Sex in the City for the Ivy League set. (Ouch – yeah, I just went there. I’m a little disgusted that it’s being made into a film.)

To sum up, a great and fast-paced summer read, especially for those of us in love with New York. You may love to hate this novel like I did, but hey, doesn’t that mean we had to love it first? But you don’t have to take my word for it!

Oh, LeVar Burton, you know what I mean.

Here’s what other critics said about Emperor’s Children.

Up next… The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson.

*****

I’m officially moved into my summer sublet and have spent a week interning and working part-time at The Hedgehog Review (THR) and UVA Health Systems respectively. Both are amazing so far, and since I haven’t really done much socializing apart from grocery shopping (ha!), I’m saving money too. (Although, a Reading Rainbow T-shirt for $20 I found while looking for that nice LeVar Burton graphic may change my previous statement infinitesimally.)

One of my friends is co-directing an independent film funded by the UVA Center for Undergraduate Excellence, and I auditioned for the female lead yesterday. She seemed to enjoy my audition and said I’ll hear back from the production staff by Friday, so we’ll see! In other news, since I’m mainly living on chicken, tuna, pasta, and salads, I’m really craving iron-rich meat, like one of the Biltmore’s cheeseburgers, whenever I get hungry. The first chance I have to go out this week – after doing work for THR, the Health System, and the class attached to the internship – I’m definitely getting me some red meat.

All right, chums! See you next time when I delve into the world of Scandinavian thriller fiction!