“The Emperor’s Children” by Claire Messud was honored by the New York Times Book Review as a “Best Book of the Year” in 2006. While the story in the novel focuses on the intertwined lives of three friends in Manhattan at the beginning of the millennium in the year before the 9/11 attacks, it is also a story about tentative relationship between fathers and daughters.

At the beginning of the novel, Marina, 30, is living at her parent’s apartment while trying to write a book. Her father Murray is a famous professor and liberal critic on political issues and her mother, Annabelle, remains a shadowy character throughout the novel. Because of the stature of Murray’s position both at the university (a fictitious liberal arts college) and as a critic in society, he is extremely critical about his daughter’s lifestyle and in particular critical about her choice in topic for her book, which is a non-fiction look at children’s clothing. Her new boyfriend, on the other hand  is a fierce critic of Murray’s and some of Marina’s friends speculate that part of his attraction to Marina is actually related to her father.

While I enjoyed “The Emperor’s Children”, I did note several parallels to Anna Quindlen’s “One True Thing”, which was also made into a movie. While Anna Quindlen’s book focused largely on the mother-daughter relationship as the daughter acts as a caretaker to her dying mother, a central theme in both the novel and the film adaptation is the daughter’s relationship with her philandering, drinking father. Without giving too much away, I can safely say that the father-daughter relationship in “The Emperors Children”  is also explored in the same fashion.

The writing in “The Emperor’s Children” sets it apart from other contemporary novels with similar plot lines. As I read through the first few chapters, I was reminded of the writing of both Henry James    and Virginia Woolf (in "Mrs. Dalloway"  in particular) because of Ms. Messud’s depth of understanding to her characters. She doesn’t necessarily use the stream of consciousness method as Virginia Woolf does, but she does analyze her characters’ motivations to the nth degree, which gives her characters much more depth than they would have otherwise.

Because the novel is set just before 9/11, “The Emperor’s Children” also touches on the aftermath of the tragedy; again, without saying much, the ends in the novel are tied up a little too neatly for my personal taste.