2007-12-27 Out of the vacuum

For this thirty-one year-old, Claire Messud's story of thirty-somethings in 2001 New York made for mortifying reading. Seeing something myself in each of the three main characters I was left wondering at the narcissistic vacuity of my own life. Was I like Danielle, a producer for PBS, who, in spite of an earnest desire to achieve greater, nobler things, makes when-liposuction-goes-wrong documentaries. Or was I more like Marina, paralysed in ever-forthcoming cultural commentary on how we dress our children, The Emperor's Children Have No Clothes by a risk aversion created by paternal expectations and the suspicion that she is pitifully ordinary. Of course, wondering which character is one's sembable is not the best way of reading a novel. It is, however, one taken by the novel's critic, Julius Clarke, who reads his life through War and Peace and whom we meet not knowing "whether to be Pierre or Natasha, the solitary brooding loner or the vivacious social butterfly". A dilemma, if not an approach, I can also understand.

Presiding over these three is Murray Thwaite, Marina's father, liberal commentator in chief, and the novel's titular emperor. Into his tranquil imperium in the manner of Tolstoy's Napoleon (don't worry, Julius will guide) comes Ludovic Seely, bent on a satirical revolution and the imperial denuding. In contrast to the main characters, Seely is singled out for his sense of purpose. Also recently arrived in Manhattan is the book's real Pierre, the like-wise chubby, Bootie Tubb, college drop-out and supplicant at the throne of his uncle Murray for guidance in an autodidact's quest for truth.

For 370 pages these characters conduct their military campaigns and love affairs against and with each other with about as much consequence as Anna and Vronsky would in the Manhattan Tom Wolfe saw as he channelled Lionel Trilling. "... Anna would just move in with Vronsky, and people in their social set would duly note the change in their Scully & Scully address books; the arrival of the baby, if they chose to have it, would occasion no more than a grinning snigger in the gossip columns." All very amusing and to little apparent purpose; it is to Messud's credit that we care about her self-avowedly vacuous characters.

In only 60 pages, the novel's characters have to deal with the negative shadow that has loomed since we learned that this is 2001. It is around 9/11 that the novel's work takes place, but the introduction of this event is not a desperate attempt to salvage it from Wolfian irrelevance. Rather Messud uses 9/11 to contrast this and the daily vacuity of her characters with the incongruity of the historical event.

The knowledge that this recent event must feature in Messud's book means that we move through her book wary of the asbestos of cliché. Such wariness is justified as while Messud avoids clichés around the actual event, she is guilty of some clumsy foreshadowing. Having established that we are in Manhattan in 2001, it is unnecessary to force our attention on a plane as it appears "to weave among the buildings, a light flashing between lights" in late July. By the time we get to September 9th one character's disfigurement in a nightclub is discussed in terms of the earth-shattering.

As much as such passages grate, they highlight the emptiness of hyperbole and, if they grate, they do so for a reason consistent with the idea that the historical event is incongruous. These people talk, I talk, as if anything out of the day-to-day is of historical significance. Life is lived from one day to another, and most of them are pretty much the same; a friend being disfigured is significant; language rises to the occasion. Having said this about the relatively ordinary, what language is there for the truly extraordinary? The point does not seem to me that language has been debased, rather that it was never sufficient. As a consequence though the extraordinary can only be described in the language of the ordinary and of earlier vacuities. The problem not only for Messud but any form with a sense of aesthetic decorum is that Marina's hyperbole is in too close a proximity to events of genuine historical significance known not to catch in the airways like literary asbestos.

Despite these grating passages, it is just this everyday vacuity and its relationship to the historical event that Messud's book explores and where its success lies. The difficulties her characters face in being extraordinary, of making a mark in what they perceive "are almost criminally uninteresting" times, are frequently given an almost Jamesian complexity. Here vacuity is given weight and depth. This is of no historical consequence, however grand or powerful the feeling, but in giving weight and depth to the historically inconsequential, Messud reveals the patterns and textures of her character's consciousness, not as they are during the extraordinary, but as they usually are, as we usually are, among the day-to-day and ordinary.

The exploration of vacuity is a risky business over 400 hundred pages, and one which Messud does not always pull off. The benefit of Julius to the plot largely appears to be that he has read War and Peace. When Danielle is mystified by the intensity of his love affair, we are less so but instead wonder why it is there at all. But like Tolstoy in War and Peace, Messud's book says something about history, in particular the incongruity of the historical event and its relationship to everyday life and preoccupations. Day-to-day experience suggests that history happens to other people. If it is the task of the novel to explore consciousness, how it veils and mists taint events then it is the banal vacuity that is of greater importance. Most hypocritical is the need to mask that vacuity, the historical vacuity of daily life. To the extent that ordinarily we choose our roles, they are chosen in that vacuum, without regard to the historical incongruity. Messud both exposes and celebrates such vacuities.