The Emperor's Children
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| Author | Claire Messud |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Published | 2006 (Knopf) |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
The Emperor's Children is a 2006 novel by the American author Claire Messud. The author's third—and her first best-seller—it was longlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize.
The novel focuses on the stories of three friends in their early thirties, living in Manhattan in the months leading up to the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Each of the three is well-educated and privileged, but struggles with realizing the lofty expectations for individual personal and professional lives.
In 2001 in New York City three friends, who all showed signs of brilliance in their youth, reach their 30s without having achieved the promise they showed a decade earlier. Danielle Minkoff is the only one of her friends to hold a steady job, working as a producer for a TV program that makes documentaries. Marina Thwaite is the daughter of a revered literary critic and author Murray Thwaite who was offered a book contract to write about children's fashion years earlier and, having used up all her advance money and facing a hard deadline, moves back into her childhood home with her parents. Meanwhile, Julius Clarke who is a brilliant and witty critic for The Village Voice cannot sustain himself with his literary work and is forced to take temp jobs to supplement his income which he finds demeaning. At one of his temp jobs he meets a successful, slightly younger, man called David Cohen and seduces him, eventually moving in with him and allowing himself to be kept like a housewife. He keeps Marina and Danielle away from David.
Meanwhile, Danielle begins two flirtations, one with Ludovic Seeley, an Australian editor who has moved to New York City to start a literary journal called The Monitor, after Le Moniteur Universel and another with Marina's father Murray, who begins an email correspondence at first using her job and later concern over Marina's unemployment as reasons to keep contacting her.
Marina, still hanging on to the last traces of her It-girl status, is unsettled by the arrival of her 19 year old cousin Bootie, who has dropped out of university in order to pursue a program of educating himself by his own design. Bootie reveres the Thwaites and looks up to his uncle Murray in whose footsteps he wants to follow, but Marina is dismissive calling him "Fat Fredrick" and find the fact that he is installed himself in the Thwaite home creepy. Despite this things quickly fall in line for Bootie. Murray is impressed by both his desire to leave his small town and his desire to self-educate. He offers him a salary and work as his private secretary. Through Marina, Bootie also is able to rent Julius' old apartment.
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