The Emperor's Children is perhaps the first successful 9/11 book. But having said that, the book really has nothing to do with 9/11. Marina, Julius, and Danielle, close friends at an elite Ivy League university, suffer from a sort of post-graduate distress syndrome. Danielle, a struggling public television producer, finds herself entangled in an inappropriate affair with an older, married man. Julius, a poverty-stricken reviewer for the Village Voice, is settling for the mediocrity of a "normal" relationship with a financial trader who has a serious drug addiction. Marina, the beautiful and much-touted daughter of a respected journalist, is living at home with her parents and desperately trying to finish a nearly decade-old manuscript, The Emperor's Children Have No Clothes, about the thrilling topic of how changes in childhood fashions are tied to changes in society.

Into the lives of these characters come three unexpected events: the wooing of Marina by Ludovic Seely, a cynical Australian publisher; the appearance of Frederick "Bootie" Tubbs, Marina's befuddled autodidactic college dropout of a cousin; and 9/11, an event that really needs no description (and, to the credit of this novel, does not get much of one). By the time it occurs, we are so caught up in the life and times of these people, that it is simply another moment in their lives — a bold, shocking move, but also deeply resonant with the way even catastrophe can be absorbed into daily existence.

Messud has written a complex and tenderly crafted character portrait of three aimless thirtysomethings living in present-day New York City. The most lovely, and simultaneously frustrating, aspect of this book is how one sympathizes with the many characters, despite their obvious foibles, fripperies, and, much of the time, superficiality. The muddled insecurity of Marina, the painfully aware self-deception of Danielle, the willing self-abnegation of Julius, and the self-absorbed monomania of "Bootie" are all uncomfortably familiar to anyone who has lived through their late twenties or early thirties in the latter half of this century.

-Sage Van Wing