Claire Messud: ‘The pace of the madness now is so intense.’ Photograph: Antonio Olmos

Interview

Claire Messud: ‘Maybe in 50 years there won’t be novels’

As her fifth novel is published, the American writer warns that shrinking attention spans could prove the death of long fiction

Tim Adams
Monday 4 September 2017

When you are a child, Claire Messud suggests, you never imagine you might not really know the people closest to you. The shock of that realisation, which perhaps comes to us all in early adolescence, is the drama of Messud’s fifth novel, The Burning Girl. The book dwells on the unravelling of a lifelong friendship between two teenage girls in small-town Massachusetts. It is a distinctive and subtle fable of lost innocence told in the voice of one of the girls, Julia, whose middle-class shyness and prized sensitivity prove inadequate as the more disturbed family and life of her wilful friend Cassie violently capsizes.

Books that made me / Claire Messud / ‘Reading Dostoevsky made fireworks go off in my head’

When I read Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground at school, it was like fireworks going off in my head’ … Claire Messud. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian 

Books

that 

made me

Claire Messud: ‘Reading Dostoevsky made fireworks go off in my head’

The novelist on how Notes from Underground lit her path to the dark side, the brilliance of Penelope Fitzgerald and comforts of Anna Karenina

Friday 15 February 2018

The book I am currently reading
I’m just starting All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski, about the last months of the second world war in East Prussia. Kempowski is also the author of Das Echolot, the extraordinary multi-volume compendium of interviews, testimonials and documentation about the second world war that surely served as an inspiration for Svetlana Alexievich’s writings about Russia – only one volume of which has been translated so far.

‘The place you left is busy changing just as you’re changing’: Claire Messud photographed at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Photograph: Rick Friedman 

Interview

Claire Messud: 'To be a writer is to stand at the side'

The novelist and Harvard academic on her mother’s dementia, getting in touch with her teenage self, and how she reacts to bad reviews

Alex Preston
Saturday 7 November 2020

Claire Messud is the author of seven novels, including the Booker-longlisted The Emperor’s Children and The Burning Girl. She was born in Connecticut, the daughter of an Algerian pied-noir father and a Canadian mother. She studied at Cambridge University, where she met her husband, the author and critic James Wood. They now live in Massachusetts, where Messud teaches at Harvard, with two teenage children and two beagles. Her latest book, Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write, a collection of essays and reviews from the past 20 years, was published last month.

Fiction to look out for in 2014

Clockwise from top left: James by Percival Everett; Lauren Elkin; The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez; Evie Wyld; This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud; Kevin Barry; My Friends by Hisham Matar; and Miranda July. Composite: Gary Calton, Sophia Evans, Karen Robinson

Fiction to look out for in 2024

The first great lockdown novel, new tales from David Nicholls, Sarah Perry and Percival Everett, and Rachel Kushner’s contender for the Booker… next year promises to be special

Alex Preston
Monday 1 January 2024

There’s a sensational selection of novels to look forward to in 2024, enough to set even the most discerning reader’s heart aflutter. Does it feel like a more ambitious and warm-hearted fictional year than usual? Perhaps. Certainly there are a number of novels here that will be read for decades to come. As usual, I will leave first novels to the Observer’s debut fiction feature next month.

 

How September 11 changed the fiction landscape in 13 novels

Ron Charles

September 10, 2021

The demonic choreography of al-Qaeda’s attack on the United States instantly rendered September 11, 2001 the most documented act of terrorism in human history. As the North Tower of the World Trade Centre burned, cameras already on the scene filmed the second plane soaring into the South Tower. Those appalling images, infinitely reproduced, colonised the minds and imaginations of a generation.

Our hero / Peter Matthiessen by John Irving and Claire Messud

Peter Matthiessen, author of The Snow Leopard. Photograph: Eamonn Mccabe for the Guardian

Our hero: 

Peter Matthiessen by John Irving and Claire Messud

Friend John Irving and former student Claire Messud remember the author of The Snow Leopard 

Obituaries / Peter Matthiessen

Peter Matthiessen / Call of the wild

Friday 11 April 2014

John Irving

My friend Peter Matthiessen, who was 86, died on April 5 at his home in Sagaponack, New York, where we once were neighbours and read each other's novels – in their embarrassing, first-draft lives.