What a wonderful novel, and how slow I've been to appreciate it rightly. I'm on my second reading of this celebrated novel by Claire Messud. It follows the intertwined fortunes of a group of Manhattanites, most of them in their early thirties, as they try to build lives just after the dot com boom and just before 9/11. The first time I read it I was stymied (I now see) by two factors. a) I had a hard time taking seriously a novel about 30-somethings in Manhattan. I have no excuse for this prejudice, but it definitley put me on the defensive from the get-go. b) I had just finished reading something I loved and was in no mood to fall in love with anyone else.
What a loss to me! This book could not be smarter about its characters, or subtler in its prose. Messud is frighteningly observant; no detail of a character's surroundings, habits, thoughts, etc., remains unexpressive in her treatment—she has these people down pat. And yet, she has endless compassion for each of them. She notes faults and flaws and self-deceptions without any contempt or stacking of the dice.
And her sentences! Some of them go on forever, and are in other ways pretty damn Jamesian, but never leave me with that horrible "omigod I hate arty novels" feeling. They are like the novel itself: twisty, complicated, funny, and just right.
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