Entanglement and Entropy in Claire Messud’s Novels

The essays collected here discuss Claire Messud’s works in sequence, thus validating the strong historical sense she nurtures through her realist fiction. They also show that the novels’ various narrative designs (such as autodiegetic retrospectivity) foster making historical connections. The book interprets Messud’s fiction in relationship to her non-fiction, and provides an interview with the author. Foci include post-World War II French Algerian emigrant identities, 1960s American Pop Art and September 11, 2001 communal trauma. Messud’s biography covers much geographical movement and she has lived on several continents. Family and direct traumas—giving rise to, or caused by, dislocation—pervade the novels, and Messud’s complex narration enacts a fictional world of multiple, cosmopolitan entanglements in which entropy increases.