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Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children
Автор: Claire Messud
Текст читает Valerie Martin и Hope Davis
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Claire Messud joins Valerie Martin to discuss her book, The Emperor's Children. Hope Davis reads an excerpt from the book.
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Начать прослушиваниеСведения о книге
Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children
Автор: Claire Messud
Текст читает Valerie Martin и Hope Davis
Описание
Claire Messud joins Valerie Martin to discuss her book, The Emperor's Children. Hope Davis reads an excerpt from the book.
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Set in New York in 2001, this novel chronicles the yearnings and failings of three friends, Danielle (perhaps our main protaganist), her best friend Marina, and their gay friend, Julius. Along the way, Claire Messud instructs us very skillfully about love and loss, about idealism and disillusion, honesty and hypocrisy.An innocent would-be disciple moves to New York and secures a position with his hero. He finds himself disillusioned in due course (where a more worldly apprentice might not), and writes a hatchet-piece in all starry-eyed honesty. Predictably, the hero banishes the youth from his employ, who moves to a Brooklyn hovel and is perhaps lost when the twin towers are hit on September 11. Whither truth? Whither idealism?Ms. Messud is particularly strong when reflecting the thought processes of her characters. Emotional forces running through friends and family ring true; I was never confused over motivation, nor by emotional cause and effect. The prose is graceful and fluid, touched perfectly by idiom. This is a writer who knows her milieu and puts you square in the middle of it. She's very effective.Character, plot, style, and theme meld ineffably here. Most definitely worth your while.
This does not deserve four stars. I suspect some intrinsic fissure is to blame for a rasher of characters that I uniformly loathed.
Viewed from a distance The Emperor's Children could be mistaken for another hackneyed tale of self-absorbed twentysomethings coming of age in the big city. It is in fact a sharp, artful group portrait in which each protagonist, every action and motivation is convincing. Messud's drawing of character is vivid and utterly real; her shifting scenes and perspectives may be cinematic, but her sentences are Proustian and poetic. Subtle, clear-eyed and critical, The Emperor's Children is a brilliant snapshot of a society hovering on the brink of history.
I use the term "read" very loosely! I read a few chapters and just had a horrible time getting into this story. Maybe I'll try it another time...
Beautifully written, good storytelling, but the main characters were so shallow and/or odious that it was really hard to care what happened to them.
pretty good.
I feel this book was somewhat overrated. The writing was interesting, at first, and the characters were familiar, likable. Something changed halfway through, and I can't quite put my finger on it...the characters turned irritating and predictable. The drama rang false and shallow....
Not a complete waste of time. But certainly not a book to knock your socks off.
Not a complete waste of time. But certainly not a book to knock your socks off.
I don't know if I can muster up the energy to write how I felt about this book. I read some of the other reviews and they all said how I feel and in a much better way.
I didn't feel like I was smart enough to be reading this book. I didn't get references to authors, books, and paintings. I kept a dictionary near me to look up the words I didn't know and then wondered why the author felt the need to use big, SAT words. It took me forever but I did finish it. I can't say I'm a better person for it though.
I didn't feel like I was smart enough to be reading this book. I didn't get references to authors, books, and paintings. I kept a dictionary near me to look up the words I didn't know and then wondered why the author felt the need to use big, SAT words. It took me forever but I did finish it. I can't say I'm a better person for it though.
I've found the one character that I have despised because of his stupidity/naiveness, whatever you want to call it: Bootie Tubb. I think he was the worst character out of all of them! I think Jill put it right when she mentioned this book was like reading about the 7 deadly sins. These people just seem so caught up in their own lives, and claimed to be friends and care about each other, but that was hardly the truth. I had a hard time getting through the first half of the book, but loved the second half. If you love to hate characters, you need to read this book.
This book is as much about identity and family-how social stature,geography/locations, and economics shape a person as it is about the "Y" generation talking amongst ourselves in various states of dissaray and ennui...wanting to be ambitious but feeling like a failure no matter what and as if it is probably just a lost cause. It's about relationships-both friendships and intimate and the terrible things that can happen.
Mainly, the book takes place in NYC but there's also a sense of isolation and separation that becomes apparent between Watertown, NY (far removed) from NYC which also affects the relationships of family members. It's an interesting juxtaposition and you can tell it affects the character's way of dealing with different situations and coping with certain truths.
I thought this was a good read but it didn't really change my life in any particular way or give me insight into any particular subject or group of people so if you're looking for that kind of novel, keep searching. However, Messud is a skilled writer and it is an engaging read and look at a set of somewhat mismatched characters that evolve a little bit in terms of both their own identities and how we as the reader perceive them.
Mainly, the book takes place in NYC but there's also a sense of isolation and separation that becomes apparent between Watertown, NY (far removed) from NYC which also affects the relationships of family members. It's an interesting juxtaposition and you can tell it affects the character's way of dealing with different situations and coping with certain truths.
I thought this was a good read but it didn't really change my life in any particular way or give me insight into any particular subject or group of people so if you're looking for that kind of novel, keep searching. However, Messud is a skilled writer and it is an engaging read and look at a set of somewhat mismatched characters that evolve a little bit in terms of both their own identities and how we as the reader perceive them.
A book about a bunch of self-absorbed, privileged people in New York just couldn't hold my attention. I wanted to like it so much because it had gotten so much buzz and good reviews. I supposed it's just not my type of book.
I seem to be in a bit of a rut..books that I can't seem to get into. This was much more than that though. I just could not have cared less about these characters, nothing redeemed them.The book follows 3 main characters around NYC for three months before 9/11 and another month after. Good premise, but...Danielle is a documentary film maker loving her independence from her Indiana mom, Julius is a Vietnamese gay man from Michigan bent on living the good life and making waves in NYC without actually working, and Marina is the spoiled pampered daughter of a famous journalist known for his cutting edge truth, caught in his shadow and only sort of trying the shed it.Sounds like a good beginning, but...Danielle gets involved with Marina's dad (YUCK!) Yes, it' her best friend and he has been her father figure! Julius finally falls in love with the Down Jones workaholic Dave and ignores the other two - then decides that a 1 man relationship is too 1950s for him. Marina has been working on a stupid book about Children's fashion for 10 years and when she falls for Seely, a slimy, Australian who hates everybody and everything, but mostly Marina's father - she finally finishes it to her father and friends horror.The title of this book comes from Marina's book. "The Emperor's Children have no Clothes" The book is supposed to trace human history through the way we dress our children.The only character that seemed to have some potential was Bootie, Marina's 1st cousin. He comes to NYC to be near the famous Murray Thwaite (Marina's father) because he believes that Murray is an honest and thought provoking man after Emerson's ideal. What he finds is that behind the facade there is only an ordinary man. So, Bootie writes an article to uncover the facade. Even this could have been redeeming - but Bootie's reaction to 9/11 took away any redeeming qualities lurking in his story. Anyway - There isn't a character you like or root for - not really.Instead I just kept reading to see what miserable lives these pretty people have. They are so busy making sure that they have no illusions, no pretend, sentimental beliefs that they are really nothing but a flat surface - reflecting what they think others want to see.It did make the book mildly interesting to have been in NYC this past summer. I had seen many of the areas they talked about.But - I would NOT recommend this book. That makes me very sad!
Engaging story of a group of individuals linked in various ways to New York City and going through a variety of personal challenges and crises, many of which are borne out of affluence. Downside: I didnt really like any of the characters. Upside: the author does a great job of blending all of the various threads into a seamless whole that continues to move forward. And there are a couple of plot twists that truly surprised.
I really wanted to like this book--it was very well reviewed. I thought it was kind of stupid, actually, although I kind of enjoyed reading it. That makes no sense, sorry!
David ("Dai") Dando is a young Southern Welshman, working in the office of a building society. After an evening in the pub, he takes Fred Peregrine home with him, an old age pensioner who has missed the last bus home and, looking a bit forlorn and out of it, reminds Dai of his Dad. But in the morning, Fred has disappeared. He turns up drowned and David is feeling guilty: should he have done more?This is the start of Dai's story of his next week, told partly as a flow of consciousness, partly as a conversation with someone whose identity we never find out. Interesting, touching, but sometimes irritating as well. Dai's thoughts are written in slang, and that is often hard to read ("yewer one of the Silures Dai don yew ever forget it e use to say"). And I always get irritated with characters that just drift along without having a clue what or where they are going and without the need to get a clue either. And I hate the end
The best thing about "The Emperor's Children" is that its author, Claire Messud, refuses to take the easy way out. It's a modern-day comedy of manners that admits that it's more difficult than ever to tie the signifiers of class and breeding to the wealth and background they're supposed to represent. There's no hackneyed commentary about "red" and "blue" America, and Messud resists the temptation to mention brand names at every opportunity, a too-easy method of characterization that many substandard fiction writers can't seem to keep away from. Her wealthier characters obviously expect a certain level of comfort from their lives, but Messud, wisely, focuses on their attitudes, not on where they shop. She also takes to heart the dictum that the rich believe that talking about money is tacky; the pressures of wealth are gently alluded to, but they're seldom discussed in the bluntest terms available. Messud takes the time to consider how the issues surrounding class and privilege affect the existences of her characters, humanizing and personalizing what can often be a drearily abstract discussion. Similarly, "The Emperor's Children" describes the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 while barely making reference to the oceans of news coverage and political commentary that followed these events. When they arrive in the novel's final third, they are merely events that disrupt her characters' lives, not just events of world-historical import. All of this means that "The Emperor's Children" feels like a startling truthful, startlingly human portrayal of what it means to be wealthy, semi-famous, and saddled with the weight of heightened expectations in New York in the first years of the new millennium. I can only wish that other writers would tackle issues of education and financial status with half the deftness that Messud displays here. Messud's writing is often as sharp as her powers of observation. Her voice is light and knowing without being crassly comical or becoming too cute for its own good, and she crafts every character in "The Emperor's Children" with real care and attention to detail. She's not afraid, for example, to spend a paragraph or two describing the particularities of a certain character's facial expression, or a page or two tracing the path of another character's thought process. Messud's got a lovely sentence, too, long, winding and graceful, that complements her novel's well-informed, slightly amused, tone. As befits any comedy of manners, Messud's characters' true selves are buried under numerous levels of artifice and pretense, and while doesn't exactly shy away from their duplicity, she's also surprisingly gentle with them. In its final pages, when its least informed character spins out of the novel's social orbit, "The Emperor's Children" makes the argument that a certain hypocrisy, or a gradual lowering of one's expectations, is essential to the process of growing up, growing wiser, and getting on in the world. Call this a universal truth limned from a set of delicately arranged, highly specific circumstances.
Knowing and sophisticated, this is a very satisfying work in which New York is a major character. This is how ambitious, successful, and financially comfortable people live and play. A young man receives the education he can't find on a campus, we're introduced to a celebrity author, and ideas percolate merrily with dry humor. Superb.
If you like character studies (like Three Junes) then you may enjoy this. The author details the lives of three former Brown classmates as they near 30 in NYC. One is a beautiful, unaccomplished daughter of a well-know intellectual. One is an underemployed, man-about-town gay guy looking for love in all the wrong places. And the third is a striving, TV producer woman who ends up having a doomed affair. The plot is secondary. Really, the focus is on their ideas about each other, the opposite sex, their hopes, and their own demons. It's been called a comedy of manners. Well, kind of. But give me Jane Austen over this any day. I guess, ultimately, that I just didn't like these people. I did enjoy some minor characters (the drop-out nephew, the intellectual father, the creepy fiance). But where is this book going? Have to say I did not like the ending (touted as being great). What a cop-out.
Marina, Danielle, and Julius were classmates at Brown University and are all now approaching 30, and making their way in New York City. Marina is the daughter of Murray Thwaite, a famous journalist. She has been working on her first book for many years, and has never held a "real job." She lives with her parents, having recently moved back home after ending a long-term relationship. Julius is a gay freelance writer who lives lives in a squalid apartment and finds work through a temp agency while waiting for his next writing assignments. Danielle produces television programs, and is the only one with a steady income. The Emperor's Children follows these three over the course of a year. While they rarely cross paths in their day-to-day lives, the bonds of friendship are strong and they do call on each other for help and support. Another key figure in this story is Frederick "Bootie" Tubb, Murray's nephew, who has dropped out of university, and came to New York hoping to find himself and make a living. Murray provides Bootie a place to live, and takes him on as his secretary. Danielle is instrumental in finding Marina a job with a magazine startup, and Marina offers both Julius and Bootie the chance to write an article for the inaugural issue. Julius meets romantic interest David through one of his temp jobs, and begins to move in very different social circles. All of the young people look up to Murray as a role model of the successful and wealthy writer. Meanwhile, Murray is dealing with a bit of a mid-life crisis, and struggles to control everyone around him. Messud draws an intriguing portrait of a certain social class. The characters in this novel are are shallow, superficial, and materialistic. It was difficult to care much about any of them, but I still found myself oddly drawn to their stories -- like watching an impending train wreck. But this book takes place in 2001 (and remember, in New York City). So of course September 11 was like the elephant in the room the entire time I was reading this book. On several instances, characters discussed events planned for September, which I just knew wouldn't turn out as planned. I was curious how Messud would address this pivotal event in the novel. After finishing the book I was left wondering if setting the novel in 2001 was just an afterthought, a convenient way to tie up the plot. The year is casually thrown into the text about 50 pages in. September 11 occurs 60 pages from the end of the book, and while it understandably changes the characters' lives, it was an all-too-easy way to catalyze certain events and bring the novel to a close. While this was a light read and somewhat pleasurable, it wasn't quite my thing.
Nearly finished this one. It is a great portrait of a group of friends who are making it or not making it in New York. I am enjoying Messud's style of writing and the descriptions of each character and their thoughts is very captivating. It is not an action story as it does move slowly. Definitely worth the effort though.
This novel's flat narrative voice and disdain with which it treats its characters hurt my overall rating of the book. The theme, class privilege, is brought into a contemporary setting, the seminal year 2001, but lacked any semblance of heart.
This was a good read, yet one ends this book feeling that so much more could have been done with the characters and storyline. The long sentences sometimes work, yet often they are just inconsistent. There are flashes of psychological insight, but the male characters are one-dimensional and poorly developed. The vocabulary sometimes feels forced, as when teenagers start using difficult words they just discovered (the sudden use of the word 'egregious' on successive pages is, well, egregious. The book had me totally absorbed up until the second half, when the flaws become more and more apparent. A good editor could have done so much more here.
When I heard Maureen Corrigan review Claire Messud's work on NPR, I wanted to be sure to read and finish this book by the anniversary of 9/11. I did so just an hour ago, and still have my breath taken away by her astonishingly masterful rendition of characters, with complex interior lives, leading up to and shortly following that day. Marina, Danielle, and Julius are the thirty-year-old friends around whom we are led to believe the book focuses. However, this is young Frederick "Bootie" Tubb's story through and through, as we gradually learn the roles those three friends, as well as all others in the book, have in shaping his inexorable development as Messud's protagonist. At times the writing - filled with more interior rather than overt dialogue - can be challenging. But if one rereads such passages, it's clear they could not have been written otherwise. There will surely be comparisons to Bonfire of the Vanities, The Corrections, and perhaps Between Two Rivers (deserving of a much wider audience than it's had) - but as a literary memorial to New York and its culture before 9/11, and as a work of breathtaking truth about human relationships, The Emperor's Children is in a class of its own.
I really liked this one. Even though it wasn't funny or weird.
At first, sentence structure unusual. Great vocabulary book Story about 30 something and their relationship. How life is a contradiction. Father famous and is he worthy of worship. Slow moving at first, but well done. Brings up a lot of discussion issues
Perhaps I should feel ashamed to say I enjoyed this book so full with vacuous characters . The Emperor's Children follows the life of three graduates of Brown through about 6 months of 2001 - notably before and after 9/11. One of the friends was the daughter of a journalist, well known in "intellectual" circles, and even after the age of thirty, she is still worshiping the man, and living under his roof. Their lives are interrupted by the intrusion of an 18 year old cousin who recently dropped out of his upstate school and moves to NYC to "learn though living", and an Australian journalist who plans to start a revolution (and his own fame) through a magazine.I found the book very well written, yet a fast and engaging to read. Yes, the characters were privileged and ignorant, but from my experience, they were equally representative of people in their situation - i.e., well off, overly coddled, smart, graduates from Ivy League schools. I enjoyed the sections of the book that dealt with the "famous" journalist coming of age and realizing his own limitations - finding it reminiscent of the life of aging academic scientists. The simultaneous naivety and clarity of the 18 years old boy was very well drawn up. Not a brilliant book for the ages, a worthy reading.
the story was alright, but the sentences too long, and i needed a dictionary every 5 pages.
In many ways, a pleasure to read -- populated by wry, more-or-less witty characters and composed in elegantly wrought sentences (although Ms. Messud could use a brush up on the subjunctive mood). Too bad the silly, melodramatic ending casts such a pall over an otherwise charming book. When it comes to fiction, personal catastrophes are infinitely more fascinating than global ones.Similar in structure and theme to Alan Hollinghurt's Line of Beauty, but not quite as perfect.
This novel opens in the spring of 2001 and examines the undirected lives of several wealthy New Yorkers. The characters are not very likeable, but the plot is interesting, and I enjoyed the richly drawn characterization. Eventually, the book bogs down and may be a bit too long.
Here is problem with the book,too much time to tell it took,cast and story unappealing,conclusion left me under reeling.