For various reasons this book, for me, is always connected with other books. I first learned of it just before Christmas, when I was in a bookstore in Waterloo and commenting to my father that I had just read On Beauty and enjoyed it considerably. A staff member came rushing up and gave The Emperor’s Children a hearty “if you liked On Beauty, you’ll also enjoy…” kind of recommendation. I didn’t buy it then, but in early January another bookstore (here in Toronto) was having a sale to welcome the new year, so I picked it up, along with a copy of the much talked about Special Topics in Calamity Physics. In between those two bookshop experiences I had been absolutely bathed in publicity about both books, and they had become inextricably linked in my mind (along with On Beauty). I know that doesn’t seem especially relevant, but I thought it would be wise to issue a caveat that my reading of this book was heavily coloured by its strange attachment in my mind to those other two books.
Much has been made, in the Slate Audio Book Club for example, of Messud’s peculiar syntax and diction. (Mostly there have been claims that her New Yorkers use wildy non-American words and rhythms, and those claims are certainly true.) Her background has exposed her to a variety of English dialects, and in interviews she claims that her exposure has been so haphazard and yet so thorough that she can no longer recall which particular word or which particular rhythm belongs to which dialect. This might normally be the sort of thing that I find jarring; British/Australian-isms in what is clearly a New York book can often spoil the whole thing. But aside from the first two or three chapters being rather stiff and at times a little muddled, I found the language of the book to be almost hypnotic. The Emperor’s Children was quite difficult to put down, mostly for that reason. (If you ever catch me using the pseudo-word “unputdownable” feel free to put an end to my life and my misery, because whether I am twenty-seven or ninety-seven, you can rest assured that my dotage is upon me.) Certainly it wasn’t the characters. On with the characters!
It’s tremendously difficult to like, or even feel sympathy for, any of these people, with the possible exception of Danielle. Murry Thwaite and his daughter Marina are, despite all their protestations to the contrary, shallow, self-absorbed, and exhibit no trait more often or more strongly than their tremendous sense of entitlement. Murray claims to have earned the right to it, and Marina, who is mostly oblivious, would claim that it wasn’t her fault if she managed to recognize it at all. Most of the characters seem to love them, though, and Murray in particular despite the fact that he is obviously the washed-up charlatan Ludovic Seeley (an obsessive, controlling, snake of a man who wins Marina’s heart, ostensibly by breaking her out from under her father’s thumb, but actually by simply replacing it with his own) claims he is. He comes from the small town of Watertown, but has shed that place and that background for the life of a sophisticated New Yorker, but as also becomes clear he has equally shed the moral centre that background gave him. It’s never stated explicitly, but much of Murray’s success stems from him being an unashamed, unabashed voice for liberal morality, but his affair with Marina’s best friend Danielle and the unrelenting eye of his nephew Frederick “Bootie” Tubbs (who hails from the very same Watertown) make it clear that he left his moral authority behind when he severed all ties with his roots. Annabel Thwaite, Murray’s wife, Marina’s mother, and dedicated social worker, could save the family from itself, but her appearances are so few and she is so amorphous that she is more of a presence than a character.
Some critics (again, I’m thinking of the Slate Audio Book Club) have complained that Julius seems like a token gay character, a collection of stereotypes necessary to depict that level of New York society, but otherwise awkward and obviously beyond Messud’s ken. I disagree. He behaves like a stereotype, certainly; he chases glamour rather than substance, is more interested in physical connections than emotional or intellectual ones, and much of what he displays as his likes and dislikes seem more like an effort to distance himself from his former faux-straight life and align himself with the “gay community” (I hate that phrase; gay folks are as diverse as straight folks in how they see themselves and what they want in and from their lives) and what is acceptable in that “community”. I have seen this happen, actually, in friends of mine who have come out; it’s as though this realization about who they are must suddenly and irrevocably change everything, although most eventually come to terms with the fact that who they love does not determine who they are, and a balance is reached between their old and new selves. I think that Julius has achieved this balance, finally, by the end of the book. His failed relationship with the horribly dominating David, while not entirely changing his fascination with the shallow, transient world of cocktail parties and infidelity, has altered it to the point where his former self, Julius the intellectual, Julius the moral human being, reasserts himself. He sees guilt, not something as simply to be avoided as unpleasant, but as a necessary outcome of behaving badly, and he accepts his guilt (over his abandonment of his friends, his treatment of Bootie, his infidelity) as his own, and well-earned.
Danielle is another kettle of fish entirely. She seems to be the only one not obsessed with their own glamour and self-importance (which is not to say that she is entirely immune to such things), keeping her responsibilities to her past and her present both firmly in view. Her mother is an important and regular part of her life (unlike with Julius and his father, although they love each other tremendously), but she has made the necessary break from childhood into adulthood (unlike Marina, who is entirely incapable of action without her father’s approval, and later, without Ludovic’s). She has a job she enjoys and a small but respectable and on-budget apartment, but like all basically good people, she is lonely (it is a truism, in both novels and life, that good people cannot be happy in love, because they lack a certain capacity for selfishness; they can be used, but they cannot use others). The only time she seems truly happy, rather than simply contented, is during the middle stages of her affair with Murray Thwaite; at that point she is past the giddy thrill of the illicit, and the stress from realizing the true import of what she has done has not driven her to obsession. For personal reasons I normally have an automatic dislike for people involved in affairs (for Murray Thwaite this was in full-effect, particularly when he was contemplating an affair with an undergrad in the early chapters), but with Danielle it was different. In part she was a victim of Murray’s voracious lechery, although she was not only perfectly willing to be seduced, she actively contributed to her own seduction, knowing full well where it would ultimately lead. Ultimately I think the reason I find Danielle so likable is because she is the most recognizably human; the least New York of the New Yorkers (although Marina is the only major character actually born in the city, to the best of my knowledge). During the affair she is always careful to be discreet, not because she is worried about being caught (although she is), but because she is worried about hurting her oldest and dearest friends. Unlike the other characters, she needs to a reason to hurt or ridicule or despise someone; the others all seem to need a reason not to. Some reviewers have claimed that she harps on her Columbus, Ohio origins as though it is a city of no consequence that is easily dismissed. Not so! She brings them to the fore so often because they are what has kept her human in the shallow, inhuman city that has corrupted nearly all the others. (Perhaps “corrupted” is too strong a word, but I can’t seem to think of a single word that means “made shallow and selfish”.)
Ludovic Seeley, Marina’s eventual husband, is simply a shark (or a snake, or whatever; choose your own disturbing-yet-predatory animal metaphor). He claims that his desire is to be Napoleon; not simply to conquer or to remake the known world in his own image, but to make the known world become a part of himself. What he really wants is to simply destroy his old idols and take their place. He hates Murray Thwaite, but only, really, because he used to admire him, and has in his own way become simply the logical extreme of his vision of Murray. Murray sees himself as speaking the truth and exposing the fraudulent; Ludovic sees himself doing the very same, but to an extent that not only includes Murray, but leaves no room for human weakness or the natural ambiguity of the daily human experience. His vigor is so great that he becomes vicious, domineering, and he is the embodiment of all that he hates.
Last, but certainly not least, we come to Frederick “Bootie” Tubbs, the Watertown nephew of Murray Thwaite. He’s obviously intelligent, but is horribly, comically unworldly, oblivious not only to the condition of his soul (I don’t mean his immortal soul, but rather that strange combination of intellect, emotion, and moral judgement that allows most people to pass for actual human beings) but to the—necessary—fictions that support the world he lives in. Bootie should be the character I like the most, the character I should be able to identify with (he is from a small town, he’s intelligent, unlucky in love and finances, and very much a victim of events not of his own making), but he’s just far too pathetic to be likable. It isn’t that he doesn’t try to work his way out of his situation, because he does. He even takes his cues about what sort of things he should be doing from his more successful family members. His biggest problem is that he’s unable to view anyone other than himself as human; he makes no allowances for their own fears or hopes or anxieties. Because they are successful he assumes that they must be happy, in control, and at all times moving gracefully through the world as though it were made for them. It is this failure of vision that keeps him from success. Like Danielle he can be used but cannot use others, but unlike Danielle he cannot see beyond his own expectations of the older, wider world.
I think the last major thing to be dealt with is the attack on the World Trade Center. It’s not quite the final movement of the novel, but very close to it, and many of the book’s loose ends are left hanging as a result. Some critics (yet again I will call your attention to the Slate Audio Book Club) have called this a rather weak deus ex machina. I will call it something else (I won’t actually give it a name, that would be stupid; I will instead just tell you why I thought it worked). I should say that after all the hours of film I’ve seen of the event, all the radio and television pieces, all the newspaper and magazine articles, Messud’s description of the attack and its aftermath is the first thing since the event itself to force an emotional reaction from me. Her detailing of it was respectful, graceful, and full of all the skill and promise her critics have denied her. If only every artist could deal with trauma in such a way. The attacks do in some way act as a deus ex machina, it’s true; the major characters never really have to clean up the messes of their personal lives, except perhaps Danielle, who was emotionally gutted by Murray’s abandonment (something she saw coming, and should have been prepared for, but of course could never be prepared for) during the attack itself. Even Bootie, who is presumed dead but in fact starting anew in Florida with a new name, is saved the ignominy of facing his mother and his failed life. The ultimate effect of including the attacks, however, is to drive home a theme and make the title of the novel resonate. Marina Thwaite has written a book called The Emperor’s Children Have No Clothes, and it is called that as much to slight her father as it is to expose the futility and triviality, not of the book’s topic (a close reading of the history of children’s clothing), but of the society that can make such a topic not only meaningful but necessary. After the attack the major characters are left with an abiding depression, a sense of meaninglessness and futility; I would argue that while a perfectly natural thing for a New Yorker to feel after such an event, the import to the book is more particular. The characters don’t need to tie up their loose ends because it has finally been brought home to them how truly insignificant their problems are, how very little of genuine value they have brought to the world, and how they had allowed their city to become a place where people such as they were inevitable and necessary (with the exception of Annabel, who continues not only to function, but to thrive, as she has been mindful and giving and unselfish through the entire text). At the end of this book, New York has no clothes. I can only be glad that, for most of the characters, they can see that new and better choices have been opened to them by this great and cataclysmic truth erupting on their doorstep.
Next: Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger.
