The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud

I was supposed to really like this book but I didn't. Arguably I hated it although I read the entire thing. I should have liked it because it was about a young woman who graduated from Brown and her relationships with her friends, family, and fiance. Additionally, she was struggling with her career in her late twenties. She was living in New York City. All that, coupled with its being on several booklists, and I was excited to read it.

What I found was a book that was hard to read about an unlikeable group of characters. The prose was complex with an insane number of words I did not recognize. The characters were whiny and unrealistic. And the storyline, including the climax and ending, were disappointingly predictable. The characters existed in what was supposed to be an erudite, cultured, shallow-but-complex world, but I wasn't buying it. The main character didn't seem to have conflicts any more complicated than Marjorie Morningstar's, and I expect more than that from fiction in 2006, supposedly about my generation.

As usual, I noted down a few passages that I enjoyed, and interestingly I noticed that they were all about one particular character, the only character I liked. Below, she is describing the changes she made in her apartment after starting an affair with an older man. (Incidentally, the fact that the only character I liked is one who has an affair says a lot about the low quality of the other characters.)

"She now kept a bottle of Lagavulin in the cupboard over the fridge and behind it, hidden, a symbolic, as yet unopened, carton of Marlboros. She kept on hand packets of heavily salted pretzels, which she was beginning herself to appreciate, and Altoids, for which he had a weakness. She felt simultaneously proud and ashamed of these accommodations."

I suppose the other bright part of the book was the omniscient third person narration. I did enjoy seeing the story unfold from polarly different points of view. In most cases, unfortunately, the writing style overshadowed this.