Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children sucked me in, against my protestations. It's a thick novel about upwardly-mobile, well-endowed New Yorkers, most of them aged 30 (the new 21!). I had expected a hackneyed satire of the cell-phone-wielding members of the cosmopolitan upper-middle-class, something on the order of The O.C. It turns out to be more thoughtful, and truer to what I know, and more pleasurable, too, being tastefully sexy, and appealingly peopled.
The characters are each emblematic of broader things, but I'm repeatedly impressed how carefully they're drawn: impressed at the countervailing qualities that might have undermined their symbolic roles, but which instead add to their humanity. Messud knows her characters very well: to the gesture, to the motive force, to the limits. I was inclined to think she was one of them, one of us, that this was veiled autobiography, until she gave herself away with a few isolated Britishisms ("midges" and "he went through with his wine," e.g.).
It's a novel about people who want much from life, who want to have engaging and useful careers, happy love lives, and to fulfill (in moderation, perhaps) their simple desires. They want to touch the culture, to write their own messages on the face of it, and they happen to sit on a platform that makes this possible. Most of them are highly educated in the approved institutions, while some are autodidacts, but all of them are well connected among New York literati (glitterati, according to the reviews). It is a novel about people for whom happiness is eminently possible, though not without a struggle.
A running theme is the tension between, on the one hand, an "older" version of liberal idealism (one of consistent, well-worn ideals and similar myopias), and on the other a "newer," shiftier, more playful strain, which wants to dismantle and replace the older one. At stake is the question of who gets to describe the culture, and whose point of view will win the day. The seesaw is delicately balanced, and 100 pages from the end, I'm not sure how it's going to unravel. This conflict within the drama is mirrored at the level of storytelling: Messud continually presents the same event from the point of view of several different characters, and every one of them seems entirely reasonable, though they're tautly opposed. The effect is one of mounting anxiety over how all this could be resolved: who is the greater deceiver, who's fooling himself the most?
It needs to be noted that the milieu is distinctly that of privileged people. The characters are rich, or talented, or both, besides being well-connected. The novel mainly avoids any sense that this high society is not the norm, that this way of life is supported by the other 99% of the planet. But there are chinks in the armor: one of the most interesting moments occurs right near the midpoint, when briefly and unexpectedly the housekeeper gets her say, re-describing the principal characters in a whole new set of terms, and bringing a new depth to the characters who otherwise were seen only from within their families and professional networks.
The Emperor's Children could be irritating, or boring, to people who don't find the moral dilemmas of the creative class vitally important. But if you find that sector of society interesting, or if you find yourself in it, you might see this as an engaging little epic for our times.