the age of innocence; Claire Messud's new novel is a wry look at ambitious young New Yorkers.(The Emperor's Children )(Book review)

Byline: Taylor Antrim

Like a latter-day Edith Wharton, Claire Messud, in her sparkling new novel, The Emperor's Children (Knopf), has given us a story of striving young Manhattanites, a confident turn from a writer whose work has always been impressive, if never quite this much fun. This is New York captured with the sharp focus of a local, a place of grand Central Park West apartments, imperious Russian cabdrivers, and all-seeing housekeepers.

Born to a French father and a Canadian mother, Messud grew up in Australia and Canada, spent summers in Toulon, France, and attended Yale and Cambridge, where she met her husband, the critic James Wood. They've lived in England, Washington, D.C., and Somerville, Massachusetts. With children aged two and five, she says, "I have now come to the fact that I'm not anytime soon moving to New York." Of course, staying away may have helped her see the city more clearly. "If you've washed up in enough weird places at enough times," she says, speaking from Toulon, where she still worries a grammatical slip will reveal her as a non-native, "the question becomes, Can you pass for 'in' ?"

Passing is a going concern for the characters in The Emperor's Children. There is Danielle Minkoff, a driven television-documentary producer who still relies on her two best friends from Brown: Julius Clarke, ...