Claire Messud

Claire Messud's "The Emperor's Children" is a novel about d world-changing events told through the smallest details. The novel takes place during the summer months of 2001, in the shadow of September 11, but it's real concerns are more personal and center on the lives of its characters. Messud takes time and care sketching her protagonists, and the voice she uses to do so is light and knowing without being crassly comical or becoming too cute for its own good. Still, she's not afraid to keep show more her focus on the small stuff. She will, for example, 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, it complements her novel's well-informed, slightly amused, tone. When the attack on the towers finally ocurrs, in the novel's final third, it's not the perfect-for-television spectacle that so many of us not living in New York at the time experienced. Messud lets us see how this event transforms each one of her characters' lives in ways both big and small. It seems that we haven't had too many writers who've been able to take on the events of September, 2001 head-on. Messud's decision to illustrate the aftermath of that terrible event in the miniature of these characters' lives seems wise and skilfully handled.

"The Emperor's Children" isn't, mind you, a mere update of an Austen novel. Her characters often find themselves faced with uniquely contemporary dilemmas, and Messud seems to have an extraordinarily complete understanding of that strange mix of education, wealth, prestige and cultural buzz that equals power in today's intelligensia. As befits any comedy of manners, Messud also offers her own take on the composition of personality and its relationship to the way her characters' interact with each other. While she describes the inner life of all of her characters in admirable detail, she is, in some ways, more interested in the neuroses and delusions they use to keep the truth hidden from both themselves and others. Her characters' true selves are obscured by numerous levels of artifice and pretense, and while doesn't exactly shy away from their duplicity, she's also surprisingly gentle with them. It still takes time and patience to learn the truth about Messud's characters, though, even if she is, in some senses, quite forthright with her reader. Indeed, she seems to argue that some amount of self-deception is necessary in life. In its final pages, when its most idealistic 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. I'll call "The Emperor's Children" a skilfull, satisfying novel very much worth reading. show less

I want to love all of Claire Messud's books because she is living the dream of A-List literary writer married to A-List literary critic...the closest thing to a celebrity literary couple we've got. Also, I love hearing her speak. But this book seems to be written by the rule of "why use one word, when you can use four?"...which is a kind of writing that gets you called a "prose stylist," but really, talk about sound and fury signifying nothing. Once you notice that the pretty words are just show more repeating the same thing that other pretty words already said a little earlier in the sentence, the book becomes an exercise in stuttering dullness.

Also...talk about first-world problems! I just can't get overly worried about a woman feeling fury about her miserable experience of creating art that she doesn't get famous for. I feel offended by her rage, not empowered by it or attracted by it. What a whiner!

A final no-no in my estimation is the perpetual set-up of highly implausible scenes just so stultifying dialog can advance the relationship between unlikely characters. For example, the main character, a third grade teacher, asks a mother to come in to the school to pick up her son early after a bullying incident, even though school is almost over for the day...just so these characters can meet, basically, and start to form a friendship. Their second meeting is even more implausible. Once I got the feeling that these characters were being manipulated into highly unlikely situations for the sake, possibly, of some thematic point, they really lost interest for me, and so did the book.

Ok, another final no-no...Claire Messud doesn't know much about elementary school teaching. The references to school routines ring either trite or factually wrong.

And the ending is ridiculous.

But really, the prose style is what depressed me most. I am left with a level of despair about what people call "good writing" in our current literary culture, because in so many ways this writing just seems to me like the most superficial shiny sentences strung one after another, each with very little of substance to say. The most lauded of our literary lights are more often than not the authors that leave me fleeing to read George Eliot again. show less

I have bookmarked so many passages in this book on my Kindle; where would I start to explain the raw emotions and thoughts of Nora Eldridge. She's an elementary school teacher with regrets, as all of us have I'm sure, about choices not made. The road not traveled. Dutiful daughter, dependable Nora, the quiet lady upstairs. Not the great artist with a passionate love life as she'd imagined.

Nora's mother Bella was Italian, an artist, creative and intelligent. She desperately wanted Nora to go show more do more, follow her dreams and not be "trapped" in a marriage and dependent on anyone.

"I always understood that the great dilemma of my mother's life had been to glimpse freedom too late, at too high a price."

In the beginning Nora is talking to us and she is angry. A barely controlled anger where she spits out her thoughts, regrets, grievances with a fuck you to the world. Not a spoiler, but this dovetails neatly into the end as we learn about her life, assumptions made by her and others and a great betrayal.

Nora falls in love with a family. Arriving late into her third grade class is Reza Shahid, an adorable little boy Nora comes to love. She is also enamoured with Reza's mother Sirena and his Lebanese father, a scholar named Skandar. She is slowly enveloped in their lives, sharing friendship and family time with them - all together and sometimes alone with only Sirena in a shared art studio or Skandar as he walks her home evenings she stays for dinner.

They talk as they walk… well actually Skandar does most of the talking about history, philosophy and life.

Nora and Sirena talk and share their thoughts and goals for their art. Close relationships between all of the Shahid family and Nora. What could go wrong.

This is a literary fiction I enjoyed very much and will seek out more of Claire Messud's work. 5 stars.........keep me reading :-) show less

Just a terrific novel. I have no idea if "The Last Life" is in any way autobiographical, but it feels too real and is too perceptive not to be. The author gets so much exactly right here that I'm really sort of shocked that this one isn't better known. It is, in a sense, a study of various ways you can be an outsider: the book's half-American half-French main character is the granddaughter of French Algerians who fled to the south of France when everything fell apart in the sixties. She's show more got a younger brother who's severely brain-damaged and must receive constant care. After her grandfather commits a shocking criminal act, she's more on her plate than the average teenager does. I can't say I know a lot about the French experience in North Africa, but Messud carefully traces contemporary French attitudes about it while describing the way that their flight from Algiers continues to influence her characters' stifling, if materially comfortable, family life. The book prose is note-perfect and flows easily over the page, but at the same time there's something oppressive about this: the author clearly wants to demonstrate just how heavily an increasingly distant past can weigh on the present present and the ways that identities that we don't really get to choose can make us feel trapped. In other words, it's also a book about the gradations of irretrievable loss.

Of course, I admit that the book might work for me because I'm a grown-up third-culture kid with my share of warm memories for a couple of places with complicated histories that were and are beset by unjust social conditions. Like this book's protagonist, I felt I lost an irretrievable bit of myself when I left them, and like her, I know that you can't really go back. A lot of people will argue the sort of thorough examination of cultural identity that Messud performs here is really not much more than navel-gazing, and well, they might not be entirely wrong. But Sagasse's intense, complicated relationships with her parents, their disintegrating marriage, and her mother's ultimately unsuccessful bid to become fully integrated into a French family that already carries more than its share of shame and secrets are also dealt with beautifully in "The Last Life." So are the main character's first, tentative forays into sexuality and her all-too-real distress she feels about the set of increasingly difficult choices facing her. So are her description of the United States and American identity as seen from the outsides. So is the author's poignant, lovingly imagined vision of a culturally hybrid French-speaking, intercontinental Mediterranean, which, now that so much blood has been shed and so much time has past, seem unworkable, but not entirely impossible. So is everything, really. I'm a total mark for books that deal with these themes, so perhaps you should take this rave with a grain of Mediterranean sea salt. But even if I weren't, I think that there's just so much to recommend here. This one is just great. Go and get it now. show less