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On the surface of things, Marina Thwaite and her two best friends from Brown University have enviable lives. Danielle Minkoff is a producer for a public television documentary series. Julius Clarke writes "devastating but elegant" book reviews for high-profile publications and is at the center of New York City's gay social scene.
As for Marina herself, she's as renowned for her brain as for her beauty --- having snagged a book deal right out of college, she has spent the better part of the last decade working on a cultural critique of children's clothing, even though her manuscript has yet to see the light of day. Barely out of their twenties, living in the world's most exciting city in the early months of 2001, the three friends seem firmly ensconced in New York's literary and cultural milieu, poised to make their mark on the world just as Marina's famous father, Murray Thwaite, did some 30 years before.
Murray Thwaite is that rare individual in America --- the public intellectual. Having made his name as a foreign correspondent in the 1960s and 1970s, Thwaite is now in demand as a talking head on television talk programs, as a guest lecturer at colleges and universities, and as a columnist for countless publications. Marina idolizes her father, serving as his unpaid secretary and as his escort to social events. Then Marina falls in love with a cynical Australian editor who relocates to New York to launch a new satirical magazine, and whose criticisms of Murray Thwaite's career and ideas seem somehow to diminish her father's relevance.
Also in for a readjustment of his opinions of Murray Thwaite is Marina's younger cousin Frederick "Bootie" Tubbs. Bootie has dropped out of Oswego State University after growing disillusioned with the cavalier attitude of his fellow students. Surely, Bootie thinks, he can gain a better education by becoming an independent scholar. And where better to do so than with his uncle Murray in New York City? As Bootie grows closer to his uncle's work, he begins to see his uncle's life and work as a sham, and is determined to expose the faults of this public intellectual in the most public way possible.
Set in the months leading up to and following September 11, 2001, Claire Messud's THE EMPEROR'S CHILDREN is an acerbically observant take on the neuroses of New York's young culturally elite at the turn of the millennium. Although the tone of the novel can at times seem bitterly satirical and cold, Messud's keen eye for detail removes the glittering façade from these characters, leaving them vulnerable, exposed (both emotionally and, at times, physically) and even surprisingly sympathetic. Impeccably plotted and exquisitely written, Messud's novel is a comedy of manners for the modern age.
--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl
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