Frivolous Lives, Interrupted

The narcissism of today’s youth and the moral vacuity of the liberal intelligentsia are common enough themes among disgruntled moralists and curmudgeonly conservatives, but rarely are they afforded the delightful aesthetic treatment of a deft novelist, combining penetrating satire with deep pathos and rich characterization.

Claire Messud’s latest novel, “The Emperor’s Children,” accomplishes precisely this; it is an enchanting comedy of manners about the New York glitterati and three aimless, prodigiously talented Ivy League graduates on the precipice of turning 30 but lacking manifest achievements to match their self-vaunted promise.

The book is magnificent for its graceful, waltzing prose, its palimpsestic plot, and its egotistic but endearingly pathetic characters. And for affluent Ivy-League sophisticates, Messud’s novel can be a masochistic joy, holding the mirror up to our sometimes vain, vapid, inchoately ambitious selves.

Marina is the glamorous and gorgeous daughter of the eminent liberal journalist Murray Thwaite, whose overweening intelligence and charisma keep her in the thrall of an Electra-like adulation of her father. Since her graduation from Brown, she has been wallowing in an abortive effort to finish her book on “how complex and profound cultural truths—our mores entire—could be derived from” the evolution of children’s fashion. The project—like its author—is silly and self-indulgent, a perfect example of the frivolity of the intellectual class. In the mean time, Marina lives on a small stipend from her parents, hobnobs with New York’s cultural elite, and pines listlessly for a life of greater meaning and seriousness.

Her brighter but less enthralling friend Danielle is more earnest in her ambitions, but just as vague. Longing to deal with issues of profound social consequence, she finds herself producing a documentary on botched liposuction experiences.

Julius, their extravagantly gay friend, is a book and film reviewer whose former potential has waned through his years of bohemian dissipation. His might be said to emulate the dictum of his personal idol, Oscar Wilde: “I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.” The problem is, in his excessive zeal for personality as an aesthetic, he has neglected to perform any “actual sustained endeavor.”

The lives of all three characters, as Murray observes, are “stymied now by the very lack of smallness…by the absence of any limitations against which to rebel.”

Murray is the metaphorical Emperor and the centripetal personality of the novel. The paradigmatic public intellectual, he invests himself—and is invested by those around him—with an aura of wisdom and moral grandeur.

But he is also a study in the hollowness and hypocrisy of authority. A barnacled 1960s liberal and a man of stalwart principles, he is nevertheless slightly repulsed by the black foster child his social worker wife brings home to their swank Manhattan apartment. He expatiates about democracy and integrity, but bullies their housekeeper and routinely engages in extramarital affairs. Moreover, in recent years, even his literary work has fallen off. He begins to plagiarize himself and rehash stale clichés. But what matters most to him, albeit unconsciously, is maintaining his lofty public image. Essentially, he becomes a parody of himself, an actor in the part of Murray Thwaite.

But two characters come on the scene with iconoclastic bravado. Seeley, the powerhungry, postmodernist Australian expat, launches a magazine in the hopes of fomenting a nihilistic revolution and toppling Murray, whom he regards as a gross charlatan and a fraud.

However, it is the morose and chubby Bootie, Murray’s nephew, who really manages to stir things up. A college dropout from rural upstate New York, Bootie comes to the city clinging to a fierce, somewhat naïve Emersonian ideal of autodidactic self-reliance.

Ultimately, he is the only one who comes to grasp the chasm between appearances and reality in the whorling world of New York high society. He begins to see the real Murray behind the sententious veneer, and is the only one with the courage and acumen to cry out: “The Emperor has no clothes!”

It is a testament to Messud’s facility as a writer that when the book suddenly becomes a Sept. 11 novel, more than two-thirds of the way through, it does not feel contrived in the least.

The sight of two planes careening into the World Trade Center is a harrowing intrusion upon the petty, superficial world these characters inhabit. It is a dark reproach of their moral frivolity—of liposuction, children’s clothes, dinner parties, and casual adultery.

Bootie is the one to articulate this newfound ethos: “It was an awesome, a fearful thought: you could make something inside your head, as huge and devastating as this, and spill it out into reality, make it really happen. You could—for evil, but if for evil, then why not for good, too?—change the world.”

It is too soon to tell if Sept. 11 will usher in a new era of moral seriousness, an end to the age of anomie and irony. But if Messud’s superb novel is any indication, our inanity and self-delusion may be more enduring than we think.

The Emperor's Children
By Claire Messud
Knopf
Out Now