Thoughts, words and deeds
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.
Reform, revolution, is also the passion of a young Australian journalist with imperial pretensions, a sinister, sexy fellow who ‘looks English or even French’. He intends to cleanse the sentimentality from the United States through his new, inflammatory New York journal, The Monitor (the name of Napoleon’s newspaper). Ludovic Seeley is a ‘snake’ who despises Thwaite, believes him to be corrupt and intends to destroy him. He is also after his daughter.
Both Thwaite and Seeley and most of the Manhattan party-going tribe talk about revolution without defining it. Certainly, nobody among the thirty-somethings appears to know anything about ‘bloody’ revolution or, until 9/11, about blood at all. Korea is mixed up with Vietnam and some find the two interchangeable. Into the penthouse, cocktail party, odd-line-of-coke talk step three creative young graduates wanting to follow a serious path: a writer, a critic and an aspiring film-director. They love each other and want to live good lives.
In among them there also steps the innocent child, Murray Thwaite’s nephew from his old home-town. He too is high-minded. He has rejected college (Harvard) to pursue truth in solitary thought and private study. And it is this idealist, Booty Tubb, whose dream of revolution turns out to be more dangerous to kind Uncle Murray than the snake’s. There is something dogged and egregious (a word Messud uses rather often) about this Emerson and Tolstoy-soaked nephew with his pasty face and smeary glasses, fat and humourless — and incorruptible — that owes something to Pierre in War and Peace, which Messud also quotes. Booty hasn’t Pierre’s aura, and Pierre would have found Booty’s behaviour towards his uncle grotesque (his beautiful cousin says it must be Asperger’s syndrome), but if he is not totally convincing, Booty is certainly someone, and a beautiful foil to the sleek Manhattan world.
On 9/11 Messud leaves most of her characters with their questions still unanswered. Only those who at nine o’clock that morning had jobs and duties — Booty’s mother teaching school in dreary Watertown, Murray’s wife, a lawyer and social worker whose husband has mysteriously disappeared — manage to cope. The semi-employed revolutionaries find that, like the idiot emperor, they have been naked and ineffective all along.
This is an ambitious, confident, most readable book by a first-rate storyteller with the youth and vitality to spread a huge canvas and enjoy filling it. As in Langland’s ‘field full of folk’ there are the evil and the good and Messud knows them all.