In The Battle of the Books, Swift writes that “Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.” Self-deception isn’t always that easy, however. Sometimes the reflection on the glass is too familiar to ignore.

I’m thankful, then, that as far as satirists go, Claire Messud is as sympathetic as she is sharp. Her 2006 novel The Emperor’s Children holds a glass up to a certain type of young, ambitious American, the type going through what David Brooks recently called “the Odyssey Years.”

The glass is well polished: I am a child of the Emperor.

The Emperor of Messud’s novel is Murray Thwaite, an accomplished American journalist who made his name covering various revolutionary conflagrations during the 1960s. His success has taken him from small beginnings at Watertown, in upstate New York, to Harvard, Europe, and Central Park West. The “children” are: Marina, his beautiful daughter who has just entered the third decade of her life in the wake of a break-up and is struggling to fulfill a book contract she obtained several years before—pop philosophy about children’s fashion, tentatively titled “The Emperor’s Children Have No Clothes”; Marina’s friend Danielle, a television producer who wants to make meaningful documentaries—about the aborigines in Australia, for example—but can’t make a successful pitch to the higher-ups; and Julius, who writes book and film reviews for the Village Voice, and whose stagnating career lacks verve and direction.

Two interlopers—illegitimate children, perhaps—are Ludovic Seeley, an Australian journalist in his mid-thirties sent by Augustus Merton (read: Rupert Murdoch) to “foment revolution” in New York City by starting a new publication, The Monitor, and Frederick “Bootie” Tubb, Murray Thwaite’s nephew, who drops out of Oswego State University before the end of his first semester, and arrives at his uncle’s house clutching a copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s collected essays, with a vow to educate himself in self-reliance and philosophy.

All the while, Murray is struggling to compose his magnum opus, a long essay on How to Live.

The dramatic irony that serves as a backdrop to the novel comes from the fact that the novel begins on March of 2001. It ends in December.

Why do I count myself among Murray’s children? I don’t live in Manhattan, and I didn’t attend an Ivy League school (Brown is the alma mater of Marina, Danielle, and Julius). My belonging comes, however, from empathy towards Marina’s sweetly-expressed, naïve desires: “I want—you know, what I’ve always wanted, Daddy. To do something important,” she tells Murray. “I’d like to write something...that mattered.”

Murray: “But on what subject? What do you believe in?”

That last question provides the deepest source of drama for all the characters’ anxious twittering and over-thinking in this busy novel, and Messud, were she as biting a satirist as Swift, could have made much of her character’s almost structural incapacity to answer it. But from the first two words of the story—“Darlings! Welcome!”—one knows that Messud sympathizes and loves her characters, and sees, perhaps, that she herself is a child of the Emperor.

In twenty-first century America, it’s hard not to be. (Danielle also notices something: “I’ve got an idea for something about the current wave of satirical press.... People who aren’t for anything, just against everything...like Russia a hundred years ago.... Everybody thought they were just disgruntled misfits, and then there was a revolution.”)

The difference comes in how we answer the question. Here—without giving away the ending—Messud seems to believe that the solution must be dramatic in the most absolute sense: a character must be completely recreated, must become a new creature.

Shamelessly, then, I join Meghan O’Rourke in discovering my own face in Messud’s glass, and in accepting the challenge that her novel poses—to the artist, but also to our culture at large.