The Emperor's Children

You might think, if you have read reviews, or even if you have read the book, that The Emperor's Children is about the pretensions of the boho liberal elite, New York ca. 9/11, the perils of idol worship, or Claire Messud's delectably perfect sentences. And you might be right. But I am here to tell you, right now, in this very blog, that even if The Emperor's Children is about any or all of those things, which it certainly is, its most important topic, nay, its central theme, is, I aver and assert, the power of motherhood. Yes indeed, Claire Messud has some babies, and lo and behold, the mothers shall save the earth.

I must confess that, as I read most of this novel, I was not so loving it. I was admiring the meticulous precision of the sentences, and the reach and breadth of the cultural observation, but the general...well, nastiness, was not so much my cup of tea. I don't think that Messud intended the book to be as nasty as I found it, but it just wasn't sitting right with me, the general sense of disdain for everyone.

Then I realized that the one character who was not deluded, in either her attitude to herself, or her attitude to others, really, in fact, the one character who was not, on a certain level, pathetic, was beautiful, forgiving, supportive Annabel Thwaite, loving mother and wife, dedicated public service lawyer, and hostess par excellence (can you say Mrs. Ramsay? I think you can, especially if you think of Murray Thwaite, her husband, as Mr. Ramsay with a feminist veneer, which is not, in this case, as oxymoronic as it might seem, the key word being veneer).

So I realized that, and didn't think much about it, and then I took a break from the book for maybe two days, 40 pages from the end (not a break because I didn't want to read, but because I didn't have time). And the funny thing was, I liked the last 40 pages of the book much better, or, perhaps, I felt much more comfortable in the last 40 pages, and I think, perhaps, that this is because 1) the 9/11 section is not only much better than any other 9/11 sections in recent novels I have read, but really very good; and 2) in the last 40 pages, the novel finally seems imbued with sympathy.

And really, what happens, in those last 40 pages, is that mothers take center stage. I'm going to try to do this without spoilers, so let it suffice to say that 1) Annabel is gracious, helpful, forgiving, and supportive, once again; 2) Bootie Tubb's mother is poignant, not oppressive, as she has been; 3) Randy Minkoff is a star; and 4) Danielle Minkoff, the only character besides Annabel whom the body of the novel kind of likes, and who, while she is not a mother, is quite maternal toward Bootie Tubb, becomes the novel's emotional core.

So that's the main thing I have to say about The Emperor's Children: it's not the emperor who really matters; it's his wife (other things I might say are that the Anglicisms annoyed me, especially given that Messud has spent much more of her life in America than in England; that I would compare this novel to On Beauty and The Corrections, but that would be an essay in itself; that Trollope seems like the historical comparison; that I liked The Last Life better [I thought that one was wonderful, a reaction I didn't have to this one], and that I fully agree with whoever said that the reason all the critics love this one so much is because it is about them).