At the center of The Emperor’s Children, in the ambiguous, and precarious, role of the “emperor,” is the aging, yet still charismatic writer Murray Thwaite, an adjunct professor at Columbia University whose prominence within his circle of admirers seems to cast more a blinding glare than an illumination. Messud’s subtly nuanced portrait of a public intellectual as both a revered role model and a “disintegrating giant” is specific enough to suggest that The Emperor’s Children is, at least in part, a roman à clef, and yet generic enough to suggest that Thwaite is an idealized, or inflated, American type:
Murray Thwaite has built his reputation on being a straight shooter. On telling it like it is. From the civil rights movement and Vietnam right down through Iran Contra and Operation Desert Storm, from education policy to workers’ rights and welfare to abortion rights to capital punishment—Murray Thwaite has voiced significant opinions. We have believed him, and believed in him.
(This double-edged encomium has been written by Thwaite’s nephew Bootie who, working as Thwaite’s assistant, and living in Thwaite’s impressively sprawling Central Park West apartment, is secretly preparing an exposé titled “Murray Thwaite: A Disappointed Portrait.”) Apart from publishing so frequently that he has begun to plagiarize his own material, Murray Thwaite has been secretly composing his life’s work, titled How to Live, part aphorisms, part essay, in the grandiloquent manner of Emerson; a project that, if it is ever completed, “would at last and indisputably elevate his name from the ranks of competent, even courageous journalists and thoughtful columnists to the rare air of the immortals.” And Thwaite has not resisted beginning an affair with a woman not only young enough to be his daughter, but a woman who is his daughter’s best friend.
Yet more vulnerable is Murray Thwaite as the father of the badly spoiled thirty-year-old ingenue Marina, a “celebrated native beauty (surely this wasn’t of no account?)” who frets about winding up “ordinary, like everyone else.” Marina has done virtually nothing since graduating from Brown ten years before except to work as a Vogue intern and to have accepted a publisher’s advance for her book “about children’s fashions and—for this was the spin—about how complex and profound cultural truths—our mores entire—could be derived from a society’s decision to put little Lulu in a smocked frock or tiny Stacey in sequined hotpants.” Having long ago spent the advance for this project, Marina has drifted about in Manhattan literary circles in a “pretense of work,” trading on her looks and on being Murray Thwaite’s daughter; her vaporous life is given a sudden, if misguided, focus when Marina is seduced by the opportunistic Ludovic Seeley who has been brought to New York to start a high-profile, well-financed “revolutionary” magazine with the goal of exposing hypocrisy, called The Monitor. A flashy amalgam of such publications as New York, the New York Observer, Vanity Fair and the late, buzz-oriented Talk, The Monitor is funded by a billionaire publisher (“August Merton, the Australian mogul. Busy buying up Europe, Asia, North America. Everything in English and all to the right”) and would seem to be a prime example of what an observer calls “the blurring of left and right politics in pure contrarianism. People who aren’t for anything, just against everything.” Unfortunately for the reptilian Ludovic Seeley and his billionaire backer, the lavish “launch” for The Monitor is scheduled for September 12, 2001—by which time its mixture of malice and frivolity has become instantly passé.
The most sympathetic, as she is the most industrious and least self-deluded of the emperor’s children, is Marina’s college friend Danielle Minkoff, a TV producer for a PBS-like channel who retains the idealism of youth even as she is confronted by the cynicism of the TV marketplace: Danielle’s suggestions for programs about the mistreatment of Australian aborigines or an update on AIDS are rejected by her supervisor who urges her toward trendier subjects like cosmetic surgery. Danielle naively rationalizes her affair with Murray Thwaite in the vocabulary of popular romance: “She considered that their connection was almost eerie, a meeting of minds, a Platonic reunion of divided souls.” Though Danielle feels a “moral repugnance” for sleeping with a man whose wife has befriended her, she can’t resist the primitive charms of the “country’s liberal conscience”:
[Thwaite] had loomed shaggy and grand like a crumbling castle, a half-ruin, in the semidarkness of her pristine apartment, his belt unbuckled and his bare torso monumental, and had held her to him so that she could hear his heart beating beneath the grayed fur against her cheek. When he spoke, his voice resounded in his chest, and entered her ear like an echo…Pressed to his chest she’d felt safe and exhilarated at once, as if swept by an internal breeze; and there seemed little point telling herself that this was immoral.
Messud tries valiantly to pump credibility and feeling into Danielle’s love affair with Murray Thwaite (“Like an addict—no, she was an addict. She thought about him all the time, or else thought about thinking about him, and the fact that she shouldn’t,” but the coolly bemused, sardonic tone of much of The Emperor’s Children, like the swiftly moving chapters, works against the myopia of romance. One feels that Danielle has been pressed into service in a role not suited for her, like a miscast actress, who, apart from the romantic scenes expected of her, is more convincing elsewhere. When Thwaite breaks off his affair with Danielle immediately, on the morning of 9/11, Danielle reacts by succumbing to a protracted depression that conflates the blow to her ego and the terrorist catastrophe:
there was no call to feel anything, there was nothing to feel because you weren’t worth anything to anyone, you’d had your heart, or was it your guts, or both, taken out, you’d been eviscerated…she had known, she had known all along, and now there was nothing but sorrow and this was how it was going to be, now, always.
The most vividly imagined of Thwaite’s erstwhile children is “Bootie” Tubbs the overweight, egomaniacal, parasitic nephew from upstate New York who imagines that he is of the elect company of Plato, Emerson, Tolstoy though he has difficulty reading a book to its conclusion; from the vantage point of youth, he soon discovers flaws in his uncle/benefactor:
He couldn’t have known beforehand how he would feel about it, that the manuscript [How to Live] would seem to him both pretentious and trite…He believed now that the Great Man had been an illusion all along, mere window dressing. Reluctantly, he slid into alignment with Ludovic Seeley: Murray Thwaite was one great con trick, a lazy, self-absorbed, star-fucking con trick.
Naturally, with the pitiless rectitude of youth, Bootie feels the need to “expose” Murray Thwaite in an article for The Monitor. Exasperating, irrepressible, Bootie is an ideal comic creation; real enough to make any of us shudder at the prospect of a youthful relative coming to visit, especially one who professes to “admire” us. So obtuse is Bootie that, after he gives “Murray Thwaite: A Disappointed Portrait” to his uncle to read, he’s genuinely surprised that Thwaite responds angrily: “Where the fuck do you get off, you little nullity, you common little piece of shit, snooping around in my papers and crapping all over them?” Expelled from the emperor’s lofty residence on Central Park West, the forlorn but unrepentant Bootie rents a room in Brooklyn and, on the morning of 9/11, somewhere in the vicinity of ground zero, disappears. (Or so it seems to Bootie’s relatives.)
The terrorist attack leveling the World Trade Center towers is placed strategically late in The Emperor’s Children, in chapter fifty-eight of sixty-seven chapters, and, viewed primarily through Danielle’s stricken eyes, it is elliptically and convincingly rendered. Such profound “historic” events, introduced into works of fiction, in which nothing can be accidental, have the force of cosmic rebukes against the pettiness of human beings and the vanity of human wishes; at once, the threat of Ludovic Seeley and The Monitor evaporates, and the sinister Seeley fades from the narrative like a banished demon. Murray Thwaite not only returns to his devoted wife Annabel (who’d been entirely unaware that he was having an affair with their daughter’s closest friend) and, true to his reputation as t
he country’s liberal conscience, responds to the demands of “his public”:
He had much writing, and speaking, to do. He formulated a reasoned middle ground that, while not stretching so far as those who claimed America deserved it, nevertheless reminded his suffering companions of the disenfranchised agonies of the West Bank, or of the ever-growing population of disenfranchised Muslim youth around the globe…Murray couldn’t help but be aware of the irony that Bootie’s [supposed] death had granted him greater nobility, an importance—he knew it to be false—as a man of justice, unswayed by the arrows of misfortune. But perhaps, had he been there to see it, Bootie would at last have been proud of his uncle.
As for the invincible Bootie: hurriedly fleeing the chaos of 9/11, on foot, Bootie thrills to feel himself utterly alone in an “unknown country,” granted a vision he interprets as Emersonian: “He had been given—his fate—the precious opportunity to be again, not to be as he had been. Because as far as anyone knew, he wasn’t.” In the spirit of Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, another weighty book he’d been trying to read, indifferent to his mother’s and relatives’ probable concern for him, Bootie simply relocates to Miami and re-invents himself, in a fitting conclusion to Messud’s mirror of our foundering times:
This time, he was ready. This person in motion was who he was becoming: it was something, too: a man, someday, with qualities…Great geniuses have the shortest biographies, he told himself; and take them by surprise. Yes. He would.
AFTER THE APOCALYPSE: JIM CRACE
The Pesthouse
by Jim Crace
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday
Sometimes she wondered if America had once been populated by a race of fools. So many old things from that time had lost their grip on the world and dropped away.
—THE PESTHOUSE
Long the province of genre entertainments—science fiction, dystopian fantasy, pre-and post-Apocalyptic films like On the Beach, Blade Runner, and the Mad Max trilogy—the future has been boldly explored in recent years by such writers as P. D. James (The Children of Men, 1993), John Updike (Toward the End of Time, 1997), Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale, 1986; Oryx and Crake, 2003), Doris Lessing (Mara and Dann, 1999), Michael Cunningham (“Like Beauty,” in Specimen Days, 2005), Cormac McCarthy (The Road, 2006). Now comes a grim prophetic fable by the much-admired British writer Jim Crace who has so imaginatively evoked long-ago, even prehistoric worlds (The Gift of Stones, 1988, is set in the Bronze Age; Quarantine, 1997, in the time of Christ) and whose brilliantly executed Being Dead (1999) manages the considerable feat of being both the most pitilessly unromantic love story you are likely to encounter—a minute observation, as through a microscope, of the processes of organic decay in the lifeless bodies of a middle-aged married couple—and the most unexpectedly romantic: “This was the world as it had always been, plus something less which once was doctors of zoology.”
Kingsley Amis once remarked that there isn’t much point to writing if you can’t offend someone; it might be said that there isn’t much point to writing about the future unless you frighten someone. Certainly the great majority of future-set fictions, from H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), and Margaret Atwood’s two, very different dystopian novels The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake, are designed to unsettle and to make the reader think. The genre to which such fiction belongs is fundamentally didactic, instructive; beyond the visceral unsettling, there are crucial lessons to be imparted. In contemporary fiction, such literary excursions into the unknown belong to the sub-genre “speculative fiction”: not old, free-style science fiction, involving extraterrestials, but fictions set upon our earth, confronting the consequences of current conditions. The aptly titled The Pesthouse is set in “America” in an indeterminate future scarcely distinguishable from a frontier, if not a Neanderthal, past. What remains of the old America has largely reverted to wilderness, much of its soil contaminated by toxins, in the wake of a sequence of catastrophes only vaguely recalled by survivors: the “Grand Contagion” “mocking” storms, floods, mud-slides, droughts, famines; “anarchy and spite.” Survivors of these catastrophes and their offspring are uneducated, illiterate, in some cases mentally impaired, lacking not only a history of their own predicament, but any sense of its loss. What remains are ill-understood but unquestioned folk sayings: “Metal has brought death into the world. Rust and fire are God’s reply.” In mounds of old debris, illiterate searchers find what they call “wordings”: “a looping example of the forgotten text that had survived on so many relics of the old country and that for some reason always begged to be touched.” Adult men and women are childlike, credulous “like children in a fairy tale” beyond their comprehension. Contemplating an old pair of binoculars, strapping young Franklin Lopez, whose episodic adventures and misadventures The Pesthouse tracks, wonders at this mysterious object “of some material too unnatural and perfect for anybody to make or find anymore.” Pre-catastrophe America has only a mythic, not an historic past:
the country their grandpas and grandmas had talked about, a land of profusion, safe from human predators, snake-free, and welcoming beyond the hog and hominy of raw place; [a country of] good climate, fertile soil, wholesome air and water; plenty of provisions, good pay for labor, kind neighbors, good laws, a free government, and a hearty welcome.
In present-day America, Franklin and his young woman companion Margaret, embarked upon a pilgrimage of sorts, are continually confronted by ruins:
a debris field of tumbled stone and rock, stained with rust and ancient metal melt. Colossal devastated wheels and iron machines, too large for human hands, stood at the perimeter of the semicircle, as if they had been dumped by long-retreated glaciers and had no purpose now other than to age. Hardly anything grew amid the waste. The earth was poisoned, probably…The smell was oily, acidic, and medicinal, the sort of smell even a skunk would avoid.
Mysteriously in The Pesthouse, and not very plausibly, the “United States of America” has vanished utterly, without a trace: not a vestige of government remains, nor even a memory of government officials or politicians. Not a vestige of law, the military, science, education, industry, technology, culture, religion. (No churches? No religious leaders, priests? Only a writer unfamiliar with the ever-volatile presence of religion in America from the reign of seventeenth-century Puritans to the political clout of twenty-first-century Born-Again Christians could imagine a post-Apocalyptic America in which fundamentalist Christian sects would not be flourishing.)
The novelty of Crace’s somewhat under-imagined blighted Eden is that the population is migrating eastward, ironically reversing the westward migrations of earlier centuries, in a desperate attempt to “emigrate” to Europe, though no one seems to know anything about this promised land, or what experiences might befall them on the gigantic sail ships that have materialized at the water’s edge, like apparitions out of Crace’s 1994 historical novel Signals of Distress, to carry them there:
[Franklin] could not imagine exactly what awaited them when they set foot aboard, what type of people they might be, what language they might speak. But he was sure that life would be more prosperous. How could it not be better there?
Crace’s irony is indistinguishable from mockery:
Here was where disease was in command. But there’d be no fever where they were going, would there? They wanted to believe it. There’d be no ague or calenture, no tick disease or cholera, no canker or malaria. Why, they had persuaded themselves, illness would be so rare on that side of the ocean that people would travel for a day just to watch a man sniff.
Franklin Lopez is so naive as to react to his first sighting of what we assume to be the Atlantic Ocean in this way: “But heaven’s glory, see the size of it. Who’s to say how long you’d need on board a ship before you reached the other bank? All day, I’d say.” In the novel’s most chilling scene, at the water’s edge, mobs of would-be emigrants
are examined by men in unidentified black uniforms who mark their foreheads with blue dye if they approve them for passage to Europe and red dye if they reject them; only the few wealthy families, able-bodied young men and boys, and attractive women of childbearing age are chosen. So desperate are the Americans to escape the “taints and perils” of their country, they seem to be oblivious of the risk of surrendering their freedom and signing on for a wholly unknown fate. Are the sinister great-masted sailing ships slave ships? Are the naive “emigrants” but human cargo to be delivered to European masters? (And why are the European ships nineteenth-century sail ships? Has Europe suffered a crash of civilization like America’s?) We never learn, since the principals of The Pesthouse decide against emigrating and decide to journey westward, in an abrupt and not very convincing reversal of intention:
[Franklin and Margaret] knew they had only to find their strength. And then—imagine it—they could begin the journey west again. They could. They could imagine striking out to claim a piece of long-abandoned land and making home in some old place, some territory begging to be used. Going westward, they go free.
The Pesthouse is Jim Crace’s eighth novel, and the most self-consciously “mythic.” Unlike Being Dead, a virtuoso fusion of high-concept fabulism and psychological realism, or such magically evoked imagined worlds as those of Continent (1986), Signals of Distress, The Gift of Stones, and Quarantine, The Pesthouse is almost purely conceptual, an idea-driven work of prose fiction that might have been more effectively executed in graphic novel form, or in film. Though repeatedly described, the “post-Apocalyptic” landscape is never more than generic, like a film backdrop, and is never made specifically American, which is to say regional—for rural America is regional, and not simply “wilderness.” Where in Crace’s first, Calvino-inspired novel Continent, Crace evoked an imaginary seventh continent through the sheer poetry of language, The Pesthouse is blandly and perfunctorily narrated, as if in the debased speech of Dogpatch residents:
In Rough Country: Essays and Reviews Page 24