AS THE title of the book suggests, The Emperor's Children is all about the deception of self and society, the chasm between what you believe and what you want others to think you believe.

And what more tried-and-tested setting for this than New York City at the turn of the millennium?

In American writer Claire Messud's fourth book, a large cast of characters are embroiled in domestic dramas influenced by the prevailing zeitgeist, which perhaps explains her repeated references to Tolstoy's War And Peace. Fortunately, Emperor's Children is a much thinner and more readable text.

The linchpins of the plot are three 30-year-old friends who are distinctly in the throes of premature midlife crises, as they ponder their accomplishments, or lack thereof.

Danielle Minkoff is a disillusioned television documentary producer who frets over tired story ideas, while Julius Clarke is a respected reviewer for the alternative newspaper, the Village Voice, who temps at various corporate offices to keep afloat.

Meanwhile, Marina Thwaite has emerged from a long-term relationship to find herself without a job or prospects, and lives in her childhood bedroom in her family's posh Upper West Side apartment.

Having signed a book deal almost 10 years ago when her star was brighter, she struggles to complete the manuscript about the social significance of children's fashion, long after she has sickened of the topic.

As she tells her father, vaguely but earnestly: 'I'd like to write something - articles, a book - that mattered.'

Preventing this book from turning into a novel about self-absorbed, ageing Gen-Xers is a colourful extended social circle, provided mostly by Marina.

Her father is famous journalist Murray Thwaite, whose championing of liberal opinions hides an old-fashioned chauvinism. Upon responding to his daughter's screech when she discovers that their cat has died in the guest room, he advises that they leave the dead cat there overnight, saying: 'I just think your mother's the one to cope with this'.

But by far the most intriguing and somewhat sinister character in the novel is Marina's 20-year-old cousin, the intelligent but socially awkward Frederick 'Bootie' Tubb, who flees his small town in upstate New York for the city to learn about the world.

Initially adopting his admired uncle as mentor, he eventually pens an article that, if published, would expose his uncle as a case of, yes, an emperor wearing no clothes.

The book is divided into five sections by the months March, May, July, September and November of 2001, and hovering over all these dreams and schemes is the impending tragedy of Sept 11.

Messud describes the fall of the World Trade Center sensitively but devastatingly, while continuing to skewer several of her characters ('We are completely f***ed', says a character who had planned to launch a sensational magazine the week after).

Keeping her finger firmly on the pulse of the times without indulging in didacticism, Messud lets her characters reach various conclusions on how to live in the aftermath.

The results are both hopeful and disquieting. Amid the chaos, she has Bootie articulate: 'It was an awesome, a fearful thought: You could make something inside your head, as huge and devastating as this, and spill it out into reality, make it really happen. You could - for evil, but if for evil, then why not for good, too? - change the world.'

If you like this, read: The Good Life by Jay McInerney (2006, $35.18 with GST, Books Kinokuniya). Two affluent New York couples are led to re-evaluate their priorities in the wake of Sept 11.

THE EMPEROR'S CHILDREN

By Claire Messud
Picador/Paperback/
431 pages/
$32.03 (with GST)/ Books Kinokuniya
**** 1/2

This story was first published in The Sundays Times on Jan 7, 2007.

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