Fiction: 'You're a little shit, a nothing, you have the intellect of a moth. You're a speck of filth from Watertown, New York, which is itself a speck of filth. You're nothing . . . A wave of my hand and you simply cease to exist."
With these words the radical writer, Murray Thwaite, reveals his true colours to his nephew, "Bootie" Tubb. Bootie is a gifted, idealistic, naïve 19 year-old who has discovered that the emperor has no clothes, and made the serious mistake of telling him so. If you want to succeed, his uncle tells him, you learn to shut up. Coming from a Noam Chomsky-type commentator, this is hard to take.
Bootie has dropped out of college, the sort of college for which Murray Thwaite has the utmost contempt - it's not Ivy League. Thwaite's real first principles - as opposed to his public liberal ideals - require that you go to Harvard, live in Manhattan (even Brooklyn won't do), and write regularly in the New Yorker. Otherwise you're "nothing".
Bootie has left his home town and his mother - whose big old house in "the speck of filth" is described with the sort of loving domestic detail reminiscent of Carol Shields's writing - and is intent on learning about life and letters. He decides to go to New York, and to the home of his great hero, his famous Uncle Murray.
The latter welcomes him with open arms, as do his charming aunt Annabel, and his beautiful, ambitious cousin, Marina.
Marina is a 30-year-old Brown graduate, who is afraid to defile her sense of her own specialness by getting a job, even an arts-related job, and has been living with her doting parents and working on a book about children's clothes for seven years. It is generally assumed that she will never finish it. She is at the centre of a group of thirtysomethings for whom Manhattan is the centre of the universe. These are the emperor's children: people like Marina's best friend, Danielle Minkoff, who would like to produce television documentaries on serious topics like racism but settles for an investigation of liposuction, and her gay friend, Julius, whose claim to fame is that he reviews for the Village Voice. His dark secret is that he "temps" periodically, to earn the rent for his slum apartment.
In her engaging and precisely written novel, Claire Messud peels the clothes off her characters. Princes and princesses of the universe in spe, they are gradually, in the casual tragedy of dawning adulthood, revealed to be flawed and compromised. In one way or another, they are all impostors and have to be, to survive in ruthlessly competitive, absurdly snobbish, literary New York. Bootie, the youngest character in the book, idiot and saint, can't accept the sad truth, and becomes the novel's sacrificial lamb.
Messud is an excellent story-teller. The novel has a plot which at times is gripping and full of tension, a tension only slightly diluted by the inevitable predictability of the ending: 9/11. In the event, she handles the denouement in an original and surprising way - even so, the ending is the least satisfactory part of the novel.
Much more satisfying is her work's subtle relationship to Tolstoy's War and Peace. While this book is not a modern version of that novel - in the way in which Zadie Smith's On Beauty is "based" on EM Forster's Howard's End - the influence of Tolstoy dapples it like light through leaves. The effect is intriguing and enriching. Julius occasionally wonders aloud if he is Natasha or Pierre, but aficionados of War and Peace will be able to amuse themselves tracing aspects of these and other characters in several of the Emperor's Children.
The way in which Messud delicately alludes to the older novel but does not allow it to overwhelm her own story is indicative of her impressive writerly intelligence and integrity. She is in touch with Tolstoy, takes what she needs, and leaves it at that. Like War and Peace, her novel successfully expresses multiple points of view, portrays even its most obnoxious characters with compassion, and charts with insight the intersection of individual destiny and history. Like War and Peace, it paints a fascinating portrait of a fashionable city and society under siege.
But will it win the Man Booker prize for which it is now longlisted?
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's latest books are Hurlamaboc (Cois Life) and, with James Quin and Ciara McDonnell, WB Yeats: Works and Days (National Library of Ireland)
The Emperor's Children By Claire Messud Picador, 431pp. £14.99
