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| Window, by Alex Bulloch |
Comedy and Catastrophe
The Emperor's Children
by Claire Messud, 2006
Friends: The Principals
Friends Marina, Julius and Danielle form the inner circle of
The Emperor’s Children: they, along
with a kind of satellite who spins around the threesome: Marina’s younger
cousin Frederick “Bootie” Tubb, are the
emperor’s children. The emperor, who may or may not be without clothes, is
Marina’s father Murray Thwaite, a celebrated New Left intellectual possibly
past his prime. Like her friends, Marina, at thirty, is drifting
somewhat career-wise; much as she dislikes the fact, her claim to fame is that
she is her father’s daughter. Julius is a butterfly. He lives a life of excess
and, with minimal exertion, turns out clever pieces for the Village Voice. Having come from a less
privileged background, Danielle has more drive than Marina or Julius, but
appears to be drifting into spinsterhood. In the first chapter, we meet her in
Sydney, researching a television show on Australia’s Aboriginals. At the
beginning of the story, Marina has just moved into her parents’ home in
Stockbridge. Danielle lives in a high rise in Lower Manhattan, in a dollhouse
of a studio with her books, an ergonomic chair, and her ‘Rothko chapel’ – four
framed Rothko posters on the wall. Julius has what all agree is a fleabag of an
apartment. Raised in Watertown, super-bright Bootie is a college dropout who
turns up in NewYork looking for intellectual adventure, and possibly, a mentor.
Offered a job by his uncle Murray, Bootie soon moves in with the Thwaites.
Realism: Supporting Cast and a Clustered Network
Into this realm of friendship come relatives and clusters of associates at
three degrees of separation. Here come, occasionally, mothers (Marina’s mother
Annabel, Danielle’s mother Randy, and Bootie’s mother Judy), and more often, suitors
(journalist and would be mover and shaker Ludovic Seeley: for Danielle or
Marina? floor trader David ‘Conehead’ Cohen for Julius), assorted persons from
the work-a-day world (students, young professionals, Manhattanites,
suburbanites, partygoers, the help, one-night stands, denizens of the gay bar
scene, a Scarsdale family celebrating the Fourth, sycophants, career rivals,
and urban crowds) and certain characters from history and literature (Napoleon,
Madame de Staël, and notably Pierre and Natasha from War and Peace).
New York
City Types, Stock Characters
While the novel’s
core cast of characters may be relatively small, it has the feel of a much
larger sampling of humanity. Why? Because the principals, Danielle, Julius,
Marina, Bootie, and in the older generation, Murray – fully developed as
individuals – also represent recognizable social types.
·
Danielle,
afraid of being Always a Bridesmaid,
is ambivalent about her middle class background and the inelegant mother who
raised her. A frequent Guest of the
Thwaites, she looks upon their charmed lives from just outside the family
circle. If Messud’s novel were an updated War
and Peace, Danielle might be an Angel
of Resignation, a Modern-Day Sonya.
Danielle as Messud wrote her, however, has a crimson dress to wear to Murray
Thwaite’s awards ceremony, and is prompted to use a lively e-mail
correspondence with her best friend’s father to rewrite the scripted Sonya
role.
·
Julius
might appear to be a gay stereotype, but isn’t. His Butterfly charm may have a particularly fée flavor, but
paradoxically, through suffering an upheaval in his personal life in especially
seamy circumstances, Julius emerges a Man
of Gravitas. Battle-scarred, a Survivor, he becomes a kind of Representative of his Generation.
·
Marina:
Fairytale Princess, Maven of Cool, Case
of Arrested Development, is in every way her father’s daughter. She may be
about to publish a book on fashion, but the source of her privilege, status,
and security will always be family.
·
Bootie,
from the story’s beginning, is all of these types: Prodigy, Drop-out, Autodidact, Outsider, Starving Student, Incognito.
·
Murray
is the Celebrity Pundit, the New Left Intellectual, and the Emperor of the fairy tale.
Realism: Thickening
the Stew
Furthering the
illusion that the lives of her fictional stars represent the diversity of millennial
America, is Messud’s strategy of presenting these characters as though their
greatest visibility occurs when they stand at the center of a
multiplicity of fluctuating relationships. Marina, for example, inhabits a
world of friendships: Marina-Julius, Marina-Danielle; romance: Marina-Ludo,
Marina-Frederick (as projected by Bootie); work: Marina-Murray,
Marina-Ludo; and family: Marina-Murray, Marina-Annabel, Marina-Bootie. In
the novel, each of Marina’s relationships is dramatized separately in short
scenes of description and usually dialogue; Marina’s key relationships are then further
illustrated in group scenes. Each of the other principals – Julius, Danielle,
Bootie, Murray – is shown, in just as extensive a way, through a similar array
of pair-bonds developed in short scenes typically of dialogue. The author’s
iteration of the pairings of different characters in diverse settings broadens
the scope of the novel, providing a kaleidoscope of constantly shifting points
of view. Messud’s plotting of complex storylines via this broad and thickly
clustered network extends the reach, and deepens the credibility, of the
novel’s social and psychological realism.
The Novelist
from the Novel
How to tell the novelist from the novel? Interviewed by Boris Kachka for an article in New York Magazine on the eve of the
release of her fourth novel, The Woman
Upstairs, Claire Messud remarks on the evolution of her style from what
Kachka calls the “gorgeous, Jamesian prose . . . meditative, circuitous” of her
first two novels (When the World Was
Steady and The Last Life) to the
“short chapters and quipy sentences” of Messud’s bestseller, The Emperor’s Children. According to
Messud, “I had a memory span about as long as the lines in a school play” when
she wrote The Emperor’s Children, then
the mother of a young infant. That Messud’s style morphed from one regulated by
complex, self-organizing units of thought to one contingent upon the demands of
the external world represents a creative adaptation. If, indeed, contingency in
Messud’s case took the form of an infant rather than, say, chapter length
dictated by the kind of serialization that shaped the novels of Dostoevsky,
Dickens and other 19th century writers, Messud’s newly concise
writing was well suited to her third novel.
Designated Timeline
Diverting
Storyline
The 67 mostly short chapters of The Emperor’s Children are dispersed over five sections of the book,
titled: March, May, July, September,
November. The five calendar sections
of the novel span a seven-month run-up to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and a coda: the near-term aftermath, just as
the shock of the attacks has begun to wear off. In her November coda, the author, much like Tolstoy in
the First Epilogue to War and Peace, ties
up some loose ends in her characters’ lives, and leaves others untied,
indicating how fictional lives can
seem to cross over into the realm of lived life – how a novel can exceed the
bounds of art. The reader, then, apprized of the month and year at the outset,
does not have the same excuse as Messud’s characters, of not knowing what is
coming. Yet it is surprisingly easy to become absorbed in the storyline and
forget about the timeline. For there is more to this narrative than aphoristic
sentences.
Claire Messud’s tightly structured novel The Emperor’s Children is similar in its architecture to Robert Musil’s
classic work The Man Without Qualities
(Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften), a literary influence given a nod by
Messud in a chapter title and used to develop the alter ego of a key character. Messud’s 21st century novel,
like its 20th century model, conjoins an end-of-an-era milieu to a
comic but hiatal mood. This tone of latency informs the manifold activity that
surrounds the novel’s characters and belies the raw sense in which they feel
their lives to be mysteriously on hold. Messud’s comedy of manners tale is
articulated by an intricate plotting of characters’ relationships, and of
intrigue surrounding the ideas and ambitions of a slice of America’s cozy East Coast
intelligentsia. The plotting of the novel’s storylines is just intricate enough
to entice readers into losing themselves along the highways and by-ways of
Messud’s sparkling social microcosm. Here the author strikes just the right
balance, offering a narrative neither too intricate in an inward-looking way,
nor so complicated in its imitation of reality, and fashioning of a diverting
scene, as to confuse. To plot is to divert, and the author’s deft plotting has
the same diversionary effect as the narrator’s engaging –– and entertaining ––
persona.
The Emperor’s Children
is shrewdly observed, its exposition lighthearted. Equal parts wit, charm, and
sophistication, this millennial tale provides the reader with the satisfaction
of viewing human folly from a superior vantage point, as well as the almost
voyeuristic pleasure of initiation into an elite circle of talents. What then
is the substance behind the novel’s charm? For this generously laid out tale is
as charming as can be. Indeed, it is one of the challenges of reading this book
to finally distinguish the authorial voice, inflected as it is with wit and
sophistication, from that of Messud’s mostly charming characters.
A Charming
Tale’s Wending
A
Catastrophic Ending
Substantive conundrums are supplied in part through the
author’s rendering of a generation now past the rite of graduation, if not of
marriage, tentatively making the transition to adulthood in the shadow of New
York enterprise, still at full throttle, and a burned-out New England respectability
and New Left ideology. Claire Messud’s psychologically trenchant treatment of
related Oedipal themes would more than suffice in the creation of a novel of
minutely observed social realism, but her purpose lies elsewhere. For all:
stories of love fulfilled, love lost, and love betrayed, the novel of ideas,
the saga of a generation, all is set adrift in the direction of a historical
watershed. In this too, The Emperor’s Children shares an affinity
with The Man Without Qualities. The
rudderless society exposed in Musil’s acerbic fiction is blissfully unaware of
the looming cataclysm of the First World War, just as Messud’s just-thirty
generation drifts unaware of the impending terrorist attack of September 11.
There are further affinities between the two novels. Musil’s
protagonist, Ulrich, joins a “Collateral Campaign” in search of a Great Idea to
celebrate Austro-Hungarian unity and 70 years of Emperor Franz Joseph’s rule.
Alas, there is no Great Idea to guide the Austrians, just as there is no
Austro-Hungarian unity in 1918. This absence of original, rigorous thought
amongst the Viennese intelligentsia finds its echo in Messud’s novel in the Emperor
Murray’s illusory status as a leading thinker. That Murray’s intellectual
bankruptcy is to be the inheritance of the next generation is spelled out in
the title of his daughter Marina’s book: The
Emperor’s Children Have No Clothes.
Influence without Anxiety
Clare Messud doesn’t play around with subtexts, and indeed,
her intelligent characters freely reference her literary influences in their
conversations. There are then two key literary texts in The Emperor’s Children: Tolstoy’s War and Peace, in addition to Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. Both texts are overtly and frequently
referenced, tipping off the reader as to the novel’s genealogy and literary-historical
context with no apparent anxiety of influence. The two texts do not play the
same role in this contemporary work of fiction, however. While War and Peace is playfully incorporated,
its characters Pierre and Natasha the subject of conversational banter about
love and marriage, Musil’s novel has a more pervasive influence – on the novel’s
structure, themes, and character development. Ulrich, Musil’s protagonist, thus
becomes the namesake of one of Messud’s characters who, amidst the chaos of
September 11, decides to take on a new identity.
However reflexive the game of comparisons between Julius’
love life and the roles of Pierre and Natasha, Tolstoy’s world remains remote
in its innocence. Indeed, Messud’s characters are better suited to the decadent
world of Musil’s salons than they are to the familiar trope of Tolstoyan
authenticity, representative of a world which Julius, Marina and Danielle make
more homely by their habit of reading Pierre and Natasha into their lives. Tolstoy’s
characters are un-self-conscious in a way that Messud’s Gen-X vanguard could
never be. The characters of War and Peace
have no literary or other cultural models who mediate their aspirations and
behavior. Thus Tolstoy’s Natasha is shocked and repelled by the artifice of the
theater, while Musil’s Clarisse plays Wagner under the influence of a self-image mediated by
Romanticism.
Duplicitous
Charm of the Storyteller
Claire Messud’s narrative voice bears some aspects of just-turned-thirty Marina’s voice. Marina is all charm, intellect, and beauty. Appearing
at Awards Night, on which her father Murray is feted, in a dress of diaphanous
blue, she dazzles the men in her circle. However, charm is a fragile thing.
Thus Murray’s view of his adored daughter is summarized as follows: “He was, in
many ways, extremely proud of her – not least of her beauty, which was, to him,
each time a surprise, as though unwittingly he had thrown a perfect pot…” (p.88);
“She was so lovely, and so charming, but she had been these things for a long
time… not as bright, perhaps, as her friend Danielle” (p.89); “Even that
student at Columbia – what was her name? Anne, Maryanne, Roanne, that was it – even
she had surely not been so naïve, and ten years younger too.” (p.91)
Messud’s authorial
voice, it could be said, displays the charm of two of her least self-aware
characters, Marina and Julius. Julius’ charm is at the core of his
friendships with Marina and Danielle and of his career as a writer. Danielle
thinks of Julius: “Since forever he had been, in his funny, intermittent way, a
gold strand in the dull fabric of her days.” (p.114) Yet for some in Julius’
circle, his charm, by the time the novel’s exposition is finished, is beginning
to wear thin. As he avoids sustained effort at work, he sparkles less and less
at review writing for the Village Voice.
Like Marina he finds it difficult to locate his true self, which becomes
further obscured in a dependent relationship. Soon even Marina says of Julius:
“It’s like his soul is evaporating.” (p.242)
It is their charm that
makes Marina and Julius vulnerable –– to self-deception and to disappointing
others. Yet this charm has real value; to riff on Messud’s image, it weaves
like a golden strand through the lives of others, opening their eyes to the
possibility of beauty and love. In this voice of light-hearted charm,
Messud charts her story arc from March through July of 2001, lulling the reader
into absorption in tales of the drifting of a generation. In the September–November portions of the novel, the narrative
gradually sheds its charm in favor of a dark irony and darker prognosticating. These
mutations in the narrative voice work because animating the storyteller’s
charisma is the true mind of the author, orchestrating, holding all the threads
of plot and subplot. Thus does Messud almost imperceptibly reposition a
brilliant comic spectacle in the shadow of the sudden catastrophic loss of
September 11, 2001.
Tragic
Turnabout
How does the author of The
Emperor’s Children modulate the narrator’s voice, transporting comedy into
the thick shadows of tragedy, and edging it away from the shadows once again?
Messud achieves this turnabout by developing her use of irony in the last
quarter of the novel, and by merging her voice, across a range of shifting
viewpoints, with the voices of the novel’s most authentic, authoritative
characters. Through the use of point of view and free indirect style in
chapters 47, 53, 58, 62, and especially 65, 66, and 67: three chapters representing
the viewpoints of Murray, Danielle, and
Ulrich (Bootie), Messud re-defines narrative
voice as the instrument that parlays mirth and gravitas alike into broad
patterns of sense and symbolism. In addition to modulating the narrator’s
voice in certain specific ways, Messud
stages the confrontation between comedy and tragedy by re-aligning the novel’s
key characters. The author effects this realignment by interrogating her
characters’ integrity in the new post-9/11 world. The advent of terrorism
in New York exposes the core of strong and weak characters alike, tests some relationships,
abruptly sunders others, and ultimately heightens the clarity of an inclusive
vision of humanity in contrast to the partial understandings that arise from
the self-deception and narrow self-interest of individual characters.
Irony
Illuminates a Darkening World
Although the author uses irony throughout the novel, the
nature of that irony changes as the timeline crosses over from March–July into
September–November. At the beginning of the story, irony, an aspect of style,
enhances the mystique and the attractiveness of Australian enfant terrible Ludovic Seeley; Danielle notes that his “his dark
hair, so closely shaven as to allow the blue of his scalp to shine through,
emphasized both his irony and his restraint.” (p. 6) Further along in the novel,
the unraveling of Julius’ and David’s romantic bond takes place just before
9/11, according to an especially grimy scenario in a chapter ironically
entitled “A Night on the Town.” Typical of the dark irony of the last quarter
of the novel is the elder-statesman-like musing of Murray regarding the uses
and abuses of his rivalrous nephew’s presumed death near ground zero: “[He]
couldn’t help being aware of the irony that Bootie’s death had granted him
greater nobility. . . And as for the book: it waited. . . Who knew, perhaps he
would dedicate the book to his nephew.” (pp. 557-558) This would be irony
sufficiently dark, considering Murray’s purported role in his nephew’s demise
(failing Bootie as a mentor, kicking him out of the familial home), except that
the author has placed Murray’s perfidy inside a kind of trick mirror that only
author and reader can see. Therefore the irony of which Murray is so keenly
aware is matched by a larger irony of which he is wholly ignorant: his nephew
is alive and well, living under an assumed name, in Miami.
Integrity at
the Core: Authentic Voice, Authentic Characters
Just as the September section
of the novel opens and closes with chapters about Bootie, so the novel itself
opens and closes – or at least reaches its penultimate chapter – with scenes
featuring Danielle, heart, mind and astute soul. Bootie and Danielle, in contradistinction to Julius and Marina – are two
of Messud’s most self-aware characters. Subject to temporary love madness they may
be, but Bootie and Danielle are also capable of being awakened to life’s
meaning, and to a sense of purpose that surpasses self-interest. As avatars
of truth, bitter truth, their viewpoints are frequently conveyed, their views
consulted, and their persistent, sometimes benighted questing represented by
the author. Danielle and Bootie are characters
with authority, albeit hard won, and when they are at the center of the story,
the charm of the storyteller becomes the authority of the author.
Murray Thwaite is also an authoritative character. The unexpected
development of Murray’s viewpoint in Chapter 65 (“Burying the Dead (3)”), in a passage
that fluctuates between omniscient author and internal monologue, revisiting Murray’s
recollections of the morning of September 11, is striking evidence of the
degree to which the author gains in authority by imagining this particular
character’s response to the trauma of personal and collective loss.
The integrity of the Murray of Chapter 65 is evident in the
fact that the quality of his personal recollections is so very different from
the quality of his commentary as a pundit. In addition, the relative
authenticity of Murray’s assessment of the immediate past is emphasized by the placement
of Murray’s Chapter 65 after Judy’s Chapter 63 (“Burying the Dead (1)”), which
relates the thoughts of Bootie’s mother, and Marina’s Chapter 64 (“Burying the
Dead (2)”), which relates his daughter’s preoccupations. Thus Judy, completely
unable to disentangle her personal grief from the collective meaning of the
tragedy, is locked into an obsessive cycle of blame and recrimination. Marina,
newly wed and intensively focused on the vicissitudes of her husband’s career
since September 11, finds it difficult to contemplate anything more serious
than Julius’ recently acquired scar.
The resilience, the vitality of Murray, (with whose conundrums
we are all too familiar by the delivery of his Chapter 65 ‘monologue’), his
complex nature, is brilliantly manifest in his destiny as a character, for his
purpose far exceeds the generous allotment of satire to which he is subject
throughout the narrative. As punishment for his role in Bootie’s presumed
death, Murray is not invited by his sister to speak at his nephew’s memorial. In the world of metafiction, however, Murray
is deemed worthy of redemption. Thus he is ‘invited’ by the author, his
creator, to deliver one of the keynotes of the November coda, of which every chapter but the last bears the title: Burying the Dead. Messud’s Chapter 65 speaker (ruminator, indeed), whose
voice blends at times with the author’s, is partly chastened. Murray's very American
motto: “More life, more” has led him to the verge of commitment to his
passions, only to be jettisoned when, in the face of the imploding Twin
Towers, Murray quickly scuttles back to the security of his marriage. That
Murray’s chastening is only partial can be seen in the resurgence, after the
terrorist attack, of the desire for “more” – perhaps not more experience this
time, perhaps not more youth – but ‘more fame, more’. As America goes shopping,
Murray takes advantage of every opportunity to expedite the return of his
currency with the public.
A Keynote
Speaker 
In what sense then do Murray’s free associative thoughts in
Chapter 65 constitute a keynote on the meaning of the 9/11 crisis, viewed in
its proximate aftermath?
Called upon by the public to make sense of the
crisis, Murray formulates ‘a reasoned middle ground’ in his explanation of the
attacks. Murray’s official post-9/11 role in the story is that of pundit, but
should he be our pundit?
Put in another way, why should the aging New Left journalist, last seen abruptly decamping from a love-nest with a view of the
disintegrating Towers, be one of the characters we attend to as having some
authority? Why should we parse his words for disclosure of some part of the
author’s wisdom, this near the close of the novel?
Throughout the novel, Murray appears as speaker and spokesman.
We first meet him in March giving a guest talk about the sixties at a Columbia
seminar, where the journalist is interviewed by a budding reporter to whom he later –
unfavorably – compares his daughter. The title of Chapter 57, “A Speaking
Engagement,” ironically refers to Murray’s cover story, in September, for his
liaison with his daughter’s friend. Now, in November, the journalist is back in favor with the
public due in part to his association with 9/11 victim Bootie: he has become a spokesman
with family cred on the topic of the hour. Yet in none of these speaking roles
is Murray authentic.
‘In the Face
of Death, More Life, Always, More’
Claire Messud uses the motif: Murray’s private motto “More
life, more,” to chart the development, and maybe a bit of transformation, in
Murray’s character. In the beginning, and consistently throughout the novel, “More
life, more” expresses Murray’s wanting what he wants, an avidity that peaks at
the point when he stages an elaborate charade to spend the night with Danielle.
Yet in the space of a few pages at story’s end, Murray’s hedonism has become
stoicism, and “More life, more” has become an affirmation of life over death.With that stoicism, Murray gains authority.
Not a speech, not really even an interior monologue, this last expression of Murray’s voice through free indirect style blends with the voice of the author. Sitting in the church pews, Murray has a vision of the stasis of Watertown, and of the passage of time. Talk of keeping his nephew’s spirit alive fills him with dismay: Bootie was “an embryo. A bean. It made no sense.” Rather than experience the advance of age in a Proustian way – as the fall from a height of a man on stilts – Murray is also dismayed to discover, amidst familiar figures from childhood, now stricken, decrepit: “his whole past…like a box unopened for forty-five years.”
Catalyzed by the shock of finding his childhood still
intact, Murray, recalling “the need to flee this hideous safety” realizes that
he and Bootie are the same. For a moment he is both of them: “they were one
soul.” Unusually for Murray, he feels a true kinship with the residents of
Watertown, which he imagines as the entity all have gathered to bury.
It is this stasis of childhood, this weird past with its
non-moving parts and moribund essence, that inspires Murray’s fantasy that
Watertown itself is being buried. It is in answer to this fantasy of burying Watertown
that he affirms the inner drive for movement, change – for escape to the wider
world: “in the face of death, more life, always, more.”
Finally, Murray has authority to the degree that he can confer
authority. Before his nephew’s memorial service, Murray sees his daughter’s
closest friend thus:
Julius, peculiar-looking always, but now positively
bizarre, with the bald patch at his hairline, from which new tufting sprouted,
and the raw mangle of his cheek, a pirate’s scar on his boyish face. In this
strangeness, he had gelled his hair like a porcupine, but Murray refrained from
comment because he thought that at thirty, for all they might seem it, Marina’s
friends could no longer be treated as children.
Spotting Julius at the close of Bootie’s memorial, Murray
first sees “the newly ghoulish Julius” as a ridiculous and grotesque figure
strolling among the graves; but Julius, seen suddenly from behind, appears as a
figure of stature and consequence:
Like a tourist he was, like a tourist visiting death.
Julius’s scarred face was frightening, and his hair looked ridiculous, with its
glistening quills, but his long navy cloth coat was rather fine, and at least
from behind, gave him an official aspect. Perhaps, then, a representative, sent
to the funeral in lieu. In
lieu of Ludovic, obviously, but of
something more, too. They were all representatives, and tourists, from another
world. They could be known simply by their coats.
Unless you think “from another world” is a reference to space
aliens, Murray’s vision of “representatives….from another world,” while it
falls short of passing the mantle, stands as an affirmation by a representative
of the established generation, of the strange-seeming but real authority of the
coming generation of observers and ruminators – and perhaps, doers. Seeing
Julius through Murray’s re-educated eyes, we no longer see a butterfly, but a
man of gravitas. Seeing Murray seeing
Julius, we see the subtle maturation of two characters simultaneously.
Is Murray’s authority finally compromised? While the
authority of Bootie and Danielle arises from their self-awareness and
authenticity, Murray’s authority derives from a self-awareness that survives despite
his egotism, grandiosity, and frequent self-deception. But in the moment that his consciousness becomes the novel’s
vehicle for insight, this character’s flaws seem no longer to matter. The rules
have changed.
From Realism to Photorealism
In the November part of the novel’s story arc, the author
plays a variation on her technique of creating ever-denser layers of reality
within the novel. In a flashback in the third Burying the Dead chapter (Chapter 65), when Murray returns home on
the day of September 11, something that
is “real,” in the logic of plot and character development – the aftermath of Murray’s affair – is
instantly displaced by something “more real.” More real is the fact that the
boy DeVaughn’s mother is missing, and indeed, she does turn out to have died in
the North Tower where she worked on the hundred and first floor. Aware that
Murray’s ‘return’ that day from a conference in Chicago is suspect, Annabel is
nevertheless grateful for his presence, and otherwise completely preoccupied
with the crisis surrounding the fourteen year-old boy whom she has taken under
her wing.
For Julius, changed in fact by a personal experience of mayhem, the
reality of unscathed innocence is displaced by a new countenance offering the
opportunity of transformation ‘from the outside in.’ This is realism beyond
classic realism, a realism that imitates a new concept of reality.
Classic realism holds a mirror up to nature. As 19th
century writer Stendhal put it: “A novel is a mirror carried along a highway.” We,
the readers, look in the mirror and see reality reflected, a framed picture.
But it is only over time that Julius, seeing himself reflected in the mirror of
other people’s eyes, will come to know his new social self. As readers of
Julius’ story, we see, not a mirror held up to nature, but a mirror held up to
human nature. We see a process of self-knowledge that occurs incrementally as
the individual sees himself reflected again and again by society. Confronted
with daily reminders of the damage done to the victims, the Towers, the City, the
skyline – will New York be changed from the outside in? Will America?
The characters’ new psychological situation is one in which the rules are suddenly changed. Priorities must be reconsidered. The characters who understand this: Annabel, Murray, Julius, and above all Bootie, fare far better than the characters who do not: Marina's Australian husband Ludovic Seeley: consumed by bitterness over the now inevitable failure of his journal, The Monitor; Danielle: overcome by heartbreak at the sudden departure of her lover; and Judy: overcome by a deeply personalized grief at the loss of son Frederick (Bootie), purportedly in the terrorist attacks.
Annabel, professionally caring and concerned with social
justice, doesn’t miss a beat, immediately grasping how profoundly collective
loss has changed everyone’s lives. At the other extreme is the self-serving
Ludo. Railing at the proliferation of Missing Persons posters and the denial
implicit therein as a particularly American reaction: always wanting a happy
ending, Ludo is out of touch with the emotional reality of the situation and
badly off-cue. As mistimed as the launch of his journal, Ludo’s rant misses the
mark, his observations not so much wrong, as irrelevant. Among the
shell-shocked survivors, no one but Marina is listening now.
Bootie instinctively grasps the situation, especially in terms of what it means for him. Everything is changed: very well, Bootie concludes, in a genuinely American reaction to crisis: that means a clean slate. For Bootie, it means a breakthrough; the opportunity to reinvent himself.
One of Messud’s wiser characters, Danielle, while initially
too traumatized to look beyond the personal loss that coincides with 9/11,
eventually reaches a deeper understanding of herself in relation to Marina, to
Murray, to the Thwaites as a family, and at the end of the line, to Bootie.
Finally, Danielle accepts her mother Randy, previously such a social
embarrassment.
What about the new rules for writing fiction? Again, many
writers miss the mark. Portraits of a terrorist written shortly before and just after the September attacks (John Updike, Philip Roth) are often derived from re-worked themes from these authors’ archives. Thus Roth dissects
suburbia and the fixation on adolescent icons, pairing a sports hero and a
beauty queen in American Pastoral (1997) as
the unsuspecting parents of a terrorist. Critical analysis of society (Aravind
Adiga: White Tiger; Mohsin Hamid: The Reluctant Fundamentalist) as the
seedbed of terrorism is often insightful, but in too narrow a way. The best
post-9/11 literature (Tash Aw, Map of the
Invisible World; Janet Turner Hospital, Orpheus
Lost; Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the
Clown) is complex in its vision, often international in scope, and uses a
focused realism and layered narrative to get to the root of the problem.
The Emperor’s Children
perhaps of all post-9/11 novels does the best job of portraying American
society – or a vital sector of American society –– just prior to the attacks,
as well as showing the beginnings of the process by which the attacks force a
previously jejeune people abruptly to come to terms with their radically
changed world.
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