Read about another novel in So's list.The Emperor’s Children
by Claire Messud
The Emperor’s Children follows the lives of three 30-year-olds—Danielle Minkoff, Marina Thwaite, and Julius Clarke—who are Brown University friends, all three of whom moved to New York to fulfill the intellectual celebration of their bourgeois precocity. Life in the city, however, is not as rewarding as it should be, particularly when a bummer in the form of 9/11 arrives partway through the book, which means that in the months after you’d better be well-equipped with dismal outrage for dinner party conversations. The initial approach might be to observe a shallow sect, but who’s to say their response to life post 9/11 is any less genuine than others’? Messud never made that judgment, and the tragedy rhymes with the struggles of the chattering class in an attentive, fresh way.
The Emperor’s Children is on Rachel Syme's list of the ten most attractive men in literature, the (London) Times' list of the 100 best books of the last decade, and the New York Times' list of the 10 best books of 2006.
Also see: David Ulin's five essential 9/11 books, five best works of literature on 9/11, five of the best new 9/11 books and eight worthy 9/11 books.
--Marshal Zeringue
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