Picador £14.99 pp448
One of Claire Messud’s characters is wondering what to write next. He thinks about Tolstoy’s Pierre wandering the abandoned streets of Moscow, and regrets he has no such public catastrophe as a backdrop to his musings. But we are in New York. It is 2001. September is approaching.
This novel carries a lot of weight: five fully developed, emotionally complex characters; a glittering city, described from the perspective of blasé insiders and from the viewpoint of those newly arrived and lonely; a historic calamity; an audaciously acknowledged pantheon of literary models that includes not only the Russians but also William Empson, the James brothers, Musil, the Book of Genesis and Napoleon’s journal. It is a heavy load, but Messud’s book is so broadly based, so resiliently humorous that it easily sustains it.
The story opens with three thirtyish friends, all single, all gifted but dissatisfied. Julius has made a name for himself as a reviewer; Marina not only has a famous father and a book contract, but is also the kind of noted beauty to whom hairdressers offer their services free; Danielle is a producer of admired television documentaries. My first responses to this trio were envy and irritation. But with the arrival in the narrative of Marina’s parents and her graceless young cousin, Frederick, the action charges up, the emotional nuances multiply and trivial questions about how to get on are replaced by the one posed by the secret manuscript that is one of the motors of the plot — “How to Live?”
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The author of that text is Marina’s father, Murray Thwaite, once a courageous news reporter, now a celebrated pundit. Arrogant in his private life, vain and venal in his dealings with the public, but still trying to be good, he is a clay-footed hero of an attractive, humane old sort. In what becomes the main storyline, he is challenged by his nephew, the teenager who knows a bit about books but nothing about life, and by Ludovic Seeley, a suave Australian magazine editor and surfer on the waves of intellectual fashion. Seeley is a one-dimensional sexy devil. But the opposition between Thwaite and Frederick, a frantic Dostoevskyan puritan in a smelly t-shirt, is tracked with such humour and sympathetic intelligence as to give the novel unstoppable momentum.
Messud is satirically observant of the surfaces of the modern city. She is funny about pretentious flower arrangements and the tension between the longing for love and the annoyance of having someone else mess up your apartment. She is as good at describing people at work as she is at conveying the atmosphere of a gay club, and she is wonderfully awake to the comedy of misunderstanding (when Julius’s new boyfriend offers Danielle a lift, Julius is grateful for his gallantry: Danielle knows the man is rudely getting rid of her).
Messud is also alert to larger ironies. It is a commonplace view that the world changed on September 11, 2001. Messud, too coolly thoughtful to accept that kind of grandiloquence, suggests that change was not precipitated but stalled. As large-hearted as it is ambitious, this is a novel that combines the old-fashioned art of storytelling with a clear-eyed view of the modern world.
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