Suddenly, not the center of the world

SEPT. 11 has become a modern touchstone, a point from which almost all of us measure ourselves, asking who we were before and who we are now. The very myths we had been taught to believe about ourselves -- that we were invincible, admired, even loved -- turned out, it seems, to be stories made up to sell a moral point of view, to keep us feeling good, safe, even superior.

Sound like territory for a cunning comedy of manners? In the hands of Claire Messud, it is, and the result is her robust, canny and surprisingly searching novel “The Emperor’s Children.” Messud’s previous works of fiction, among them “The Last Life” and “The Hunters,” have shown her to be an elegant, serious writer who can interweave intimate stories of individuals with wider considerations, both political and philosophical. Even if her characters are not directly hit by world events, they are always subtly shadowed by such larger contexts.

In “The Emperor’s Children,” Messud strikes a decidedly frothier tone than she has in the past, creating a delicious social satire about a small group of navel-gazing New York intellectuals (and their romantic and social shenanigans) on the eve of the end of the world as we knew it. Here, she shows us how history does and does not change us, how character is borne helplessly forward by external events while remaining stubbornly true to itself. This intractability is her characters’ strength as well as their often hilarious -- and ultimately sad -- burden.

With a light-handed irony that is, by turns, as deceptively measured as Edith Wharton’s and as cutting as Tom Wolfe’s, Messud describes a constellation of lives that revolve around the story’s unclothed emperor -- the difficult, self-aggrandizing liberal journalist Murray Thwaite. In a setting where truth is hotly defended (but proves an amusingly bendable and highly customized commodity), Thwaite believes himself an avatar of a kind of “moral journalism,” in which his version of events is the only one of value. Stumbling into late middle age, he clings to his reputation as an intellectual and, to a lesser degree, an academic lothario. His self-mythologizing has become his central preoccupation, and he cleaves to a carefully constructed and even more carefully promoted idea of himself even as his life begins to fall apart.

Surrounding this molten center are Thwaite’s daughter, Marina, a 30-year old former “It” girl who still lives at home, and Marina’s two college friends: the steady and serious Danielle and Julian, an emotionally detached gay man with a destructive ambivalence about intimacy. Each of them has a wrong-headed sense of entitlement, and each imagines his or her world the epicenter of all that “matters” -- even if such a world encompasses only a small swath of New York’s Upper West Side. Their self-importance, their social swagger, their intellectual gamesmanship are all drawn with fine satiric gusto, as Messud makes clever entertainment of her characters’ parries and thrusts. She conveys this landscape with precision (down to the throw pillows) but also manages to raise the situations here far beyond type with dead-on emotional accuracy.

Thwaite and his coterie are, of course, ripe for wrecking, and Messud places two delectable obstacles in their paths. One is the clever but smarmy Ludovic Seeley, an Australian who has come to New York to make his mark with a magazine that aims to pierce the heart of the self-satisfied liberalism Thwaite espouses. The second danger appears in the form of the novel’s most complicated and heartbreaking character, Bootie Tubb (a great Dickensian name in a cast of great names), the deluded and misguided nephew Thwaite takes under his wing, only to find the boy his most lacerating foe.

The trouble that ensues is marvelously orchestrated and achieved with vivid winking humor, as Messud both skewers and loves her characters so that we may do the same. Yet despite the obvious pleasure she takes in her capacious satire, the author is after something more. Even as her characters stumble over their own delusions, they seek the kind of genuine connection that will make them recognizably human to themselves. As such, their carefully constructed images end up showcasing the pervasive anomie of that reckless, pre-disaster era, when the self-immersion of the country’s most entitled was dogged by the unsettling suspicion that maybe they’d gotten it all wrong.

What we know before the characters do, of course, is that March 2001, when the book begins, will lead to May (the novel’s sections are delineated by month) and that inevitably September will arrive, with its most terrible deus ex machina. The challenge of using Sept. 11 as a literary device is a complicated one. Messud falters a bit in the attempt; occasionally the coincidences seem forced, the use of the event as a consequence for her characters’ moral philanderings perhaps too easy a syllogism.

But Messud is too keen an observer of character and the world at large to be entirely bested by the challenge. She prevails, in an almost acrobatic sleight of hand, by confronting head-on the very pitfalls she wants to avoid. She knows that the new myth we’ve quickly made for ourselves (and are busy believing) is both accurate and not: Yes, we are forever changed. True, nothing will ever be the same. Those twin gongs have sounded, somber and portentous, almost from the moment the twin towers fell.

For Messud, however, this is an impetus to dig deeper. Bootie, who is perhaps most dramatically affected by the event, imagines that the tragedy signals an end to myths, especially the self-generated sort that have defined his uncle’s life. Thwaite, he reflects late in the novel, “whose greatness lay not in his words or his actions but simply in his capacity to convince people of that greatness, starting, naturally with himself, Murray who was emperor in this place of pretense, a land that stretched from Oswego to the heart of Manhattan and beyond -- surely even Murray, above all Murray, would be toppled by this.”

In a way, he is correct. Lies have been revealed, gods have been savaged, self-concepts have been radically shaken. Not one character emerges from the disaster without scars, both literal and figurative. And in some deep and genuine ways, their lives are forever altered.

Still, like ants repairing a ruined anthill, the people here begin to reconstruct their myths almost as soon as they are shattered. We’ve no doubt that Thwaite will somehow resurrect himself in the wake of the event, becoming one of its new mythmakers. Bootie, meanwhile, takes up a new ethos of redemption and renewal, even though this is even more damaging to those who care for him. Messud seems to be telling us that we must have our myths; we can’t do otherwise and exist. They are our strength and our folly. And folly, as she so dazzlingly demonstrates, is the stuff that reveals us in all our hilarious, pathetic and, yes, sometimes even heroic glory.