Claire Messud's latest novel is set under the shadow of 9/11 but still displays a new lightness of touch, writes Eileen Battersby
She could be Edith Wharton; perhaps she is Edith Wharton? But Wharton, although born in 1862, did not publish her first book until 1899, and became a 20th-century writer. Her fellow American writer Claire Messud, who was born just over a century after Wharton, is an interesting modern novelist who looks most decidedly to the 19th century narrative form.
Anyone preparing to meet Messud during the past 12 years, since the publication of her impressive first novel, When The World Was Steady, would have expected an encounter with an intense, formidable intelligence, an old-style intellectual with an approach to story that owed something to George Eliot's sense of an artist's responsibility to posterity. Yet such preconceptions have come tumbling down with her entertaining new book, The Emperor's Children. It is, as expected, a good book, it is also alive with human behaviour, some good, most of it bad, or at least selfish and, aside from a most unlikely affair, devastatingly convincing.
It is multilayered, far less internalised and self-consciously literary than her previous works, less obviously polished although the literary references are there; Emerson, Tolstoy and Musil. It is also her first American novel. Aside from all this, it shows a new lightness of touch.
Still perceptive and observed, but more in the style of Thackeray than Tolstoy. Set in New York, the narrative follows a small band of self-obsessed thirtysomethings, former college buddies who have kept in touch, and who have finally - just about - figured out that they are grown up. In the hands of many another US novelist, say Jay McInerney, this book could have ended up reading like an angst-ridden episode of Friends, but Messud is too careful for that. This new book reads as a satirical comedy of manners, albeit one with a discreetly serious underside.
Messud as a person also proves far less formidable than some of her photographs. She has sleek, dark hair and a well-groomed, relaxed elegance.
She manages to be poised yet enthusiastic and has a good, unforced sense of humour. Now 40, she looks a good deal younger and her lively intelligence - she is Edith Wharton - gazes out of her friendly brown eyes. No, she may be an intellectual, but she is not tormented by her intellect.
Her irony is kindly, secured on the sympathetic side of coolly bemused. It takes about two seconds to realise that this is a person you simply have to like. The novelist in her is interested in my Welcome-to-Dublin account of daring the traffic to meet her and of how three young fellows, with apparently little else to do, decided to leap on to the bonnet of my world-weary vehicle. "How'd you get rid of them?" she asks, with an expression that suggests she didn't think that that kind of thing happened in Ireland, but is interested to discover that it does. On hearing that I didn't do anything because the uninvited passengers soon got bored and abandoned ship, she pauses for a moment as if imagining what could have happened.
She has always been interested in other places because she has felt like an outsider all her life. The daughter of a French-Algerian father and a Canadian mother (hence her eligibility for the Booker prize, awarded to citizens of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland), she was born in 1966 in the US - "but I grew up mainly in Sydney and Toronto as well as the States and I went to school in the States [ Yale] and later studied at Cambridge." Messud's sister was born in France and she agrees that she owes her appearance to her French father. "I'm from all over the place," she says with an apologetic smile. The Messud clan by its nature tends to live on the move.
This sense of displacement has certainly influenced her fiction, which has already travelled widely in setting - from Bali and the Scottish island of Skye to the south of France and Algeria, Ukraine, wartime Europe and Canada, not forgetting Australia and London. Finally, after When The World was Steady, The Lost Life, and The Hunters, here is a large-hearted novel rooted firmly in a New York which emerges as a character in its own right.
It is as if Messud the American has finally come home in more ways than one.
"Well, we [she and her husband, the British critic James Wood] live in the States now." They also have small children and are settled - if Messud will ever settle - in Somerville, a Massachusetts suburb which is near Harvard, but as she says with glee, "is on the wrong side of the tracks". It was also where she was when the horror of 9/11 began to unfold. "I was in the house, watching this madness that was happening up the road. We had just had our second child and I remember thinking 'what have we done? What kind of world have we brought this child into?'." Five years on and she still remembers how the attack and its aftermath left her unable to write. "I have always wanted to write about America and I was aware that I hadn't. Earlier that year, 2001, I had actually begun to write it but then all of that happened and I just stopped and couldn't, and began something else and left that too. After a couple of years I went back to it and it became this book which I had been thinking about for longer than I had realised." The idea of adults caught in an extended childhood seemed to appeal to her probably because that is the way we live now. "Everybody thinks they're still young when they aren't." This particularly applies to one of the central characters, Marina, who is the daughter of Murray Thwaite, a well-known journalist who once wrote important things but nowadays concentrates on his status as a commentator. Marina also happens to be beautiful, and this, added to her father's reputation, has secured her an advance for a book she is having difficulty writing.
Into all of this self-love and complacency slides Ludovic Seeley, newly appointed editor of an about-to-be-launched magazine with an iconoclastic brief to fell the mighty - Murray is the ideal debut target. His destruction arrives in the shape of his 19-year-old nephew, "Bootie" Tubb, fat, idealistic, from back home, Watertown New York, and willing to write the sort of article that will damage Murray and help launch Seeley's new magazine. Of course, Marina falls for Seeley. Meanwhile, her best friend, earnest, Rothko-loving lowly producer Danielle, not so good-looking, not so privileged, is about to become involved with the dreaded Murray.
Somehow Messud makes her deeply flawed characters, if not quite uniformly likeable, human and convincingly real - with the noted exceptions of Murray and the sneaky Ludovic. "Bootie", the innocent who thinks he knows best mainly because he reckons he has read books, is the one closest to Messud. "Yes," she says, "I was like that," and it becomes easy to imagine her younger, serious self, a self who always believed in books.
That she has maintained that belief only strengthens the feeling of good will and integrity that Messud inspires without ever appearing moralistic.
Although the events of 9/11 are described only at the close of The Emperor's Children, a sense of something about to happen does prevail like a dust cloud over the entire narrative. But as Messud says, "it's because it had happened".
