Before the fall.(The Emperor's Children)(Book review)

The Emperor's Children, by Claire Messud (Knopf, 448 pp., $25)

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IF it were non-fiction, Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children might have been titled Brats: A Study in Pre-9/11 Liberal Narcissism. I'm glad she wrote it as a novel, though, because neither sociopolitical analysis nor literary fiction--which this is--typically makes for such tense, compelling, cunningly plotted reading as Messud has accomplished here.

Her previous novels were of a certain high-toned, fancy-pants variety with "international" themes, so you wouldn't necessarily have expected this from her. But The Emperor's Children absolutely nails just the kind of people who most enjoy thinking of themselves as the type who read those other books.

The protagonists are a trio of 30-year-old Manhattanites, college friends who met at Brown and stayed close thereafter. Messud's theme is the feeling of entitlement shared by these spoiled children. They have very little of substance--not even much money--to justify their sense of superiority. This is a parable of the privileged, empty liberalism, wildly out bravest feat he had ever seen performed by an American soldier.) Ted Jr. died five weeks later of a heart attack. His son would write his mother: "It was like the magnificent climax of a great play." FDR, his longtime nemesis, the commander-in-chief he had finally chosen to serve, would die the following year.

Joe Jr. and Jack Kennedy might have had it even tougher. They not only had to satisfy their demanding father's ambition for them; they were called upon to burnish Joe Kennedy's tarnished reputation. As Emery writes, "Joe [Jr.] had to excel, to live up to the faith that his father had in him ... Jack had ... to equal his brother or outperform him ...