The Emperor's Children
by Claire Messud
Pan Macmillan, HK$128
The back cover blurb describing The Emperor's Children doesn't do the book justice. Although it introduces the three main characters - Danielle, Marina and Julius - and underscores the prominent role of New York City in their lives, it fails to convey Claire Messud's writerly skills, which turn a near-soap opera about 30-year-old lives into a compelling, well-plotted novel. The threesome are ex-Brown University graduates who have stayed close to each other even as their dreams of achievement have foxed with age. Danielle is a clever but frustrated television producer who enters into an unwise relationship; Marina, the frivolous daughter of lauded journalist Murray Thwaite and would-be author of a seemingly never-to-be-completed book about children's apparel titled The Emperor's Children Have No Clothes; and Julius, an indigent freelance critic whose talent has amounted to little. Their unfulfilled lives and relationships provide sufficient material to sustain the book, but Messud enhances the narrative with satellite characters such as an Australian wonderboy sent to New York to launch a journal of radical cultural criticism. The action surrounding these players takes place from March to November 2001, with the September 11 terrorist attacks figuring large in their attempts to work out the meaning of life amid the violence, indiscretions, betrayals and disappointments that blight their privileged existence.