Word: novels
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Claire Messud’s latest novel, “The Emperor’s Children,” accomplishes precisely this; it is an enchanting comedy of manners about the New York glitterati and three aimless, prodigiously talented Ivy League graduates on the precipice of turning 30 but lacking manifest achievements to match their self-vaunted promise...
...book is magnificent for its graceful, waltzing prose, its palimpsestic plot, and its egotistic but endearingly pathetic characters. And for affluent Ivy-League sophisticates, Messud’s novel can be a masochistic joy, holding the mirror up to our sometimes vain, vapid, inchoately ambitious selves...
Murray is the metaphorical Emperor and the centripetal personality of the novel. The paradigmatic public intellectual, he invests himself—and is invested by those around him—with an aura of wisdom and moral grandeur...
...testament to Messud’s facility as a writer that when the book suddenly becomes a Sept. 11 novel, more than two-thirds of the way through, it does not feel contrived in the least...
...soon to tell if Sept. 11 will usher in a new era of moral seriousness, an end to the age of anomie and irony. But if Messud’s superb novel is any indication, our inanity and self-delusion may be more enduring than we think...