This, Claire Messud’s fourth book, is a splendid American novel, contemporary yet historical, with an avalanche of characters flowing across the world from Australia to Manhattan to small-town America and to Florida. The time-span is a mere seven months, ending in the November after 9/11.

The emperor of the title, like the Wizard of Oz, has several different faces. Sometimes he is Napoleon, sometimes the unfortunate emperor of fairy tale who struts about naked until an innocent child shouts out that he is a dupe. Sometimes he has the face of a contemporary American national treasure called Murray Thwaite, a dedicated philosophical and political journalist whose message has always been the need to reform the whole ethos of the United States. He is a charmer, a popularist, touchingly, unrepentantly attached to whisky and cigarettes, a bon viveur, happily married but keen on women.

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