“The Emperor’s Children” entwines the stories of Danielle Minkoff, Marina Thwaite and Julius Clarke, who met at Brown University
and came to New York in the early 1990’s, giddy with the parochial
entitlement of expensively educated young Americans. Each expected to
do something important and each, at 30, is still struggling to make
something of him- or herself. The most pragmatic of the three (she has
Midwestern roots), Danielle has a job as a producer of television
documentaries, but her skills exceed the demands of her job, and she
finds herself doing stories about liposuction. Julius, a gay
half-Vietnamese transplant from a small town near Detroit, is a
freelance critic and flibbertigibbet who has failed to live up to his
collegiate precocity. He has written no books, has found no steady work
and despises the “bourgeois regularity” required to hold down an office
job. Marina, a “celebrated” beauty and the daughter of the legendary
journalist and liberal opinion-maker Murray Thwaite, has been
struggling for years to finish a book that will reveal how children’s
fashions reflect “complex and profound truths” about our culture. In
their way, these three embody the different methods by which American
privilege is accrued and idly sustained.In the spring of 2001,
two destabilizing forces enter their lives: Ludovic Seeley, an
Australian magazine editor who holds nothing sacred and plans to start
a contrarian publication that will spur a revolution, and Frederick
Tubb (known as Bootie), a chubby, bespectacled 20-year-old in
possession of a healthy dose of smarts and an unhealthy amount of
resentment. A college dropout, and the nephew of Murray Thwaite, Bootie
desperately wants to be self-reliant — to carve out a path of true
Emersonian independence in a commodified culture that equates
individualism with personalized salads. Having fled his drab,
well-meaning mother and his dreary home in Watertown, N.Y. — the
community where his uncle was also raised — Bootie comes to live in the
exquisite Thwaite household in New York. Here he will begin work as
Murray’s “amanuensis” (Murray’s word), only to discover that his
idealized uncle’s “vaunted authenticity” is not what it seems.“The
Emperor’s Children” is a
novel about the gap between the real and the
perceived, and Thwaite père is Messud’s most striking embodiment of
that gap. Here is a man who purports to believe in “the voice of the
people” and has never met a liberal cause he doesn’t like, yet is
mildly repulsed by the young, troubled black client of his wife,
Annabel, who works at a nonprofit social service agency. A proponent of
trust and democracy, Murray nonetheless conducts extramarital affairs
and behaves with the sort of entitlement that comes more easily to male
intellectuals than to their wives. Coming home late one night, he steps
in cat vomit, and although he’s revolted he barely pauses as he tiptoes
down the hall : “It still was not, nor could it ever be, his role to
clean up cat sick.” That chore is left for his (very busy) wife to deal
with in the morning.“The Emperor’s Children” is, on its surface,
a stingingly observant novel about the facades of the chattering class
— with its loves, ambitions and petty betrayals — but it is also, more
profoundly, about a wholesale collision of values: those of the
truth-telling but hypocritical Murray Thwaite, who epitomizes earnest
1960’s liberalism, and the Machiavellian Seeley, who represents
postmodernism and its assumption that truth is fungible. The
metaphorical pawn in their struggle — a struggle over status — is
Bootie Tubb, who is too young to accept that he lives in a world of
filigreed self-absorption rather than pragmatic transcendentalism, and
who rightly sees Murray’s self-satisfaction for what it is. And so
Bootie — poor, clueless Bootie — becomes both the novel’s antihero and
its hero, setting out to expose Murray by writing a tell-all article
for Seeley’s newmagazine. The discovery of his plan polarizes the
Thwaite family and their friends, though even Murray has a flash of
admiration for Bootie’s strict-minded principles; he himself has been
worrying over his daughter’s woolly-headed lack of accomplishment (“I’d
like to write something — articles, a book — that mattered,” she tells
him) and the fact that she and her friends are “stymied ... by the
absence of any limitations against which to rebel.”“The Emperor’s Children” is full of satirical chiding, but it’s one of
the more delightful — even delicious — forms of such chiding I’ve
encountered. Messud’s prose is whorled and Jamesian, of a syntactical
complexity that only a confident stylist could handle. Her plot is
labyrinthine and deftly orchestrated; without wanting to reveal its
twists and turns, I can say that what might seem harsh or
overdetermined in the hands of another writer is dealt with
unflinchingly but not viciously. For the most part, the details hit
home. As a 30-year-old Ivy League
graduate employed by a “contrarian” publication and editing a
cultural section like the one Seeley eventually hires Marina to run, I squirmed
when the character expresses delight at her new job. It’s “not ditsy
cultural,” she tells Danielle, “like listings — he wants essays,
serious but controversial essays on cultural issues. ... Like, is PEN
really a worthwhile institution. ... Or a renegade appraisal of modern
art, the New York art scene, is Matthew Barney a fraud, that kind of
thing.” (I once tried to assign exactly that piece. Touché.)GET THIS BOOK FREE.BUY SELL RENT BOOKS FROM THE LINK BELOW.