The Emperor’s Children

Photograph: Nick Himmel

As if to flaunt her uncanny understanding of human nature, Claire Messud fleshes out the personalities of her characters so thoroughly and authentically that it is difficult to single out which one (if any) is the central figure of her new novel. Because of this across-the-board three-dimensionality, it is also nearly impossible to imagine that they don’t all really exist. Add to that the book’s setting—New York City in 2001, with historical events and pop-culture references accurately in place—and the story comes alive with astounding vividness.

The Emperor’s Children is populated by a set of three friends from college who are pushing 30 and trying to get their lives together: the beautiful, unemployed Marina Thwaite; the less comely but quicker-witted Danielle Minkoff; and Julius Clarke, a swishy Midwesterner intent on a life of Wildean excess. Upon the arrival of Bootie Tubb, Marina’s intelligent and bumbling 20-year-old cousin, and the introduction of Ludovic Seeley, an Australian intellectual who’s in New York to launch a “revolutionary” (in his words) magazine, liaisons develop, secrets form and a set of healthily discrete lives become miserably and inexorably intertwined.

Messud’s writing is poetic, her insights spot-on, and her voice and cadence shift subtly according to each chapter’s focus. The Emperor’s Children is agonizingly bleak in moments; our familiar characters become woefully locked inside their own secret experiences, betraying each other in spite of the unconditional commitments that bind them together. We as readers are the sole witnesses of all their clandestine disloyalties; it is a lonely omniscience. Ultimately, though, it is heartening to read words that so skillfully capture the city, the time and such wonderfully textured people. — Kate Lowenstein