The Emperor's Children Reading Guide & Discussion Questions

Book Club Discussion Questions

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For supplemental discussion material see our Beyond the Book article, and our BookBrowse Review of The Emperor's Children.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

ABOUT THIS GUIDE

The introduction, discussion questions, suggestions for further reading, and author biography that follow are meant to enliven your group’s discussion of The Emperor’s Children, Claire Messud’s richly plotted, densely populated comedy of manners and ideas. Like some of its high-profile antecedents, it’s set in New York City: not the august, whalebone-corseted New York of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence nor the brainy, feuding city of Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, but New York at the turn of the 21st century, when restaurants have taken the place of museums–and maybe even churches–and every new magazine launch is billed as the opening salvo of a revolution. It’s a New York where ideas, along with beauty, have become a form of currency, essential for anyone who wants to go anywhere but not to be taken too seriously. Much of the novel’s comedy arises from the misunderstandings between those characters who understand this and those who don’t: The latter have their hearts broken.

At the novel’s center are two young women and a young man, friends since college, who are now entering their thirties. Marina Thwaite is a beautiful “It” girl who by virtue of her looks and connections has been given a contract for a book she’s not sure she can write. Danielle Minkoff is a thoughtful young woman laboring in the purgatory of television and longing romantically for something better. Julius Clarke is frivolous, hard-living, and famously witty, having parlayed said wit into a career as a downtown critic but not much of a living: to his torment, he has to work temp jobs. All of these three revolve at varying proximities around Murray Thwaite, Marina’s father, an aging liberal journalist of lofty reputation and even higher self-estimation. It’s he who is the Emperor of the novel’s title. Soon Murray’s gravity draws a fourth satellite, his young nephew Bootie, an awkward, worshipful boy who aspires to become a genius and sees Murray as essential to that objective.

It’s Bootie’s arrival in New York that sets much of the novel’s events in motion. He gets a job as Murray’s secretary and–after Julius hooks up with a rich, doting boyfriend–sublets his apartment. He pines for Marina even as she becomes involved with the man Danielle had set her sights on, the elegant, serpentine Australian magazine editor Ludovic Seeley. And when Bootie’s worship of Murray predictably turns sour, he announces his change of heart with a gesture that destroys the equilibrium the other characters–mistakenly or not–took for happiness. There are comedies that leave a book’s characters with whipped cream on their faces and comedies that leave them deeply, and sometimes painfully, changed, and The Emperor’s Children is one of those. Thanks to Claire Messud’s deft grasp of character, her flawless eye for New York’s social hierarchies, and her deliciously unscrolling sentences, her book also changes the reader.


Reader's Guide

1. At the novel’s onset, most of the characters are outside New York: Danielle in Australia, pursuing an idea for a story and finding someone to have a crush on; Marina at her parents’ summer house in Stockbridge, accompanied by Julius; and Bootie in his mother’s house in upstate New York. Why might Messud have chosen to begin in this manner? At what other points in the book do the characters leave the city and with what results?
   


2. Messud introduces her characters through their environments: the womblike bathroom where Bootie soaks in hot water and serious literature; the Thwaites’ resplendent Central Park West apartment; and Danielle’s pristine, aesthetically climate-controlled studio. What do these spaces tell us about their occupants? Why might the author have used this rather old-fashioned way of ushering us into a novel set in 2001? Where else does she employ the techniques of an earlier age of literature?
   


3. Which of the novel’s characters strikes you as its moral center? Is it Bootie, who comes to New York with such high ideals and easily rankled feelings? Is it Danielle, who has lived there long enough to feel at home there but who still sees its pretensions and absurdities? With which of these characters is the reader meant to identify? Whose judgments seem the most reliable? And what flaws or blind spots afflict even him or her?
   

Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Vintage. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.