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Summary
Summary
From the New York Times best-selling author of The Emperor's Children, a masterly new novel: the riveting confession of a woman awakened, transformed and betrayed by a desire for a world beyond her own.
Nora Eldridge, an elementary school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts, long ago compromised her dream to be a successful artist, mother and lover. She has instead become the "woman upstairs," a reliable friend and neighbor always on the fringe of others' achievements. Then into her life arrives the glamorous and cosmopolitan Shahids--her new student Reza Shahid, a child who enchants as if from a fairy tale, and his parents: Skandar, a dashing Lebanese professor who has come to Boston for a fellowship at Harvard, and Sirena, an effortlessly alluring Italian artist.
When Reza is attacked by schoolyard bullies, Nora is drawn deep into the complex world of the Shahid family; she finds herself falling in love with them, separately and together. Nora's happiness explodes her boundaries, and she discovers in herself an unprecedented ferocity--one that puts her beliefs and her sense of self at stake.
Told with urgency, intimacy and piercing emotion, this brilliant novel of passion and artistic fulfillment explores the intensity, thrill--and the devastating cost--of embracing an authentic life.
Author Notes
Claire Messud was born in Greenwich, Connecticut. She grew up in the United States, Australia, and Canada. She returned to the states when she was a teenager. She did undergraduate and graduate studies at Yale University and Cambridge University.
Messud's debut novel, "When The World Was Steady" (1995), was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. "The Emperor's Children" was a New York Times Bestseller and was longlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize. Her most recent novel, "The Burning Girl" was published in 2017 by W. W. Norton.
She has taught creative writing at Amherst College, Kenyon College, University of Maryland, Yale University, in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers in North Carolina, in the Graduate Writing program at The Johns Hopkins University, and at Harvard University. Messud also taught at the Sewanee: The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. She is on the editorial board of the literary magazine The Common, based at Amherst College.
The American Academy of Arts and Letters has recognized Messud's talent with both an Addison Metcalf Award and a Strauss Living Award. She is s a recipient of Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
It's not that elementary school teacher Nora Eldridge's life has gone particularly wrong, it's that it hasn't gone particularly right. She sold out her artistic dreams for success and stability, and become angry and full of self-loathing somewhere along the way. But when a young student, Reza Shahid, and his family enter her life, Nora finds herself changing as she is drawn into the Shahids' world. Cassadra Campbell's narration is pitch-perfect. She shifts back and forth between the different characters, lending all of them unique voices that capture their complexity. Her first-person narration is a delightful blend of restraint and emotion that will keeps listeners slightly anxious at all the right moments. By striking this balance, she captures the hard edge of Nora-and of the text-in a way that will resonate with listeners. A Knopf hardcover. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In this acid bath of a novel, the superlative Messud (The Emperor's Children, 2006) immolates an iconic figure the good, quiet, self-sacrificing woman with exhilarating velocity, fury, and wit while taking on the vicissitudes of family life and the paradoxes of art. Nora, our archly funny, venomous, and raging 42-year-old narrator, recounts her thirty-seventh year, when she was living alone and teaching third grade in Boston after the death of her profoundly frustrated mother. Nora longs to make art but hasn't mustered the necessary conviction. Enter the Paris-based Shahids. Reza, her new student, is a magnet for bullies stirred up by post-9/11 xenophobia. His Palestinian Lebanese father, Skandar, is a prominent academic spending a year at Harvard. His Italian mother, Sirena, is an artist in need of a studio and a studio mate. She promptly recruits Nora. A confident and passionate conduit for mythological powers, Sirena creates lush gardens and jungles made out of household items and refuse. Unworldly and lonely Nora, a veritable daughter of Ibsen, builds dollhouses small, painstakingly accurate replicas of the rooms occupied by women artists ranging from Emily Dickinson to Edie Sedgwick. Messud's scorching social anatomy, red-hot psychology, galvanizing story, and incandescent language make for an all-circuits-firing novel about enthrallment, ambition, envy, and betrayal. A tour de force portraying a no longer invisible or silent woman upstairs. --Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Claire Messud's latest novel, "The Woman Upstairs," is an incongruous mashup of a very self-consciously literary novel (invoking the likes of Chekhov) and one of those psychological horror films like "Single White Female" or "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle," in which someone, ominously, is not who she appears to be. Ms. Messud's dazzling 1999 novel, "The Last Life," showcased her abundant literary gifts: her understanding of the complexities of familial algebra and the intersection of public and private history. Though less organic and emotionally satisfying, her 2006 novel, "The Emperor's Children," attested to her ability to write a best seller that moved back and forth between the comic and the tragic, the satirical and the intimately personal. "The Woman Upstairs" boasts an even splashier, attention-grabbing plot, but it never makes a leap into narrative hyperspace. The reader can never quite shrug off the sense that the novel is a sort of laboratory experiment that hasn't entirely gelled, an experiment in which an author who writes with Jamesian attention to emotional nuance has tried to inject a tabloidy story line with literary import. Whereas the tale of a family's dissolution in "The Last Life" possessed all the visceral complexities and unexpected developments of real life, the story in "The Woman Upstairs" has a schematic quality, as if points on an outline were being methodically ticked off and fleshed out. And while Ms. Messud does an intricate job of mapping her heroine's inner life, the literary references can sometimes feel horribly heavy-handed: it's hard to forget that the whiny narrator is a woman named Nora, who just happens to build little dioramas that look like dollhouses. It's as if these allusions had been lacquered onto the story to compensate for its more sensationalistic and contrived plot twists involving sex, lies and videotape. Nora, as we quickly learn, is one very angry woman, who, like her namesake in Ibsen's "Doll's House," is in search of an identity for herself. She's a third-grade teacher who has spent her life being the good girl, the A student, the devoted daughter, the responsible "woman upstairs" - not the madwoman in the attic, she insists. She's the kind of woman who might be a close relative of Ellison's Invisible Man or Dostoyevsky's Underground Man. Her mother's nickname for her was Mouse. Nora's mother, who felt suffocated in her suburban marriage, exhorted Nora to go out in the world, get a job and not become dependent on a man: " "Don't ever get yourself stuck like this,' she hissed." Becoming a teacher was a practical choice, but Nora has dreamed of another life - a life as an artist, as an urban sophisticate, at home in places like Paris and Rome and Madrid, not teaching elementary school in Cambridge, Mass. She won plaudits in high school for coming up with an inventive solution to an art assignment and since then has secretly cherished wild ambitions. Her current project consists of little dollhouselike constructions, depicting rooms inhabited by Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Alice Neel and Edie Sedgwick. It's hard for the reader to tell how trustworthy a narrator Nora is, and things get considerably messier after she meets the Shahid family. The Shahids have moved to Cambridge from Paris for a year, and their son, Reza, is one of Nora's newest students. Nora promptly falls in love with every member of the family. She thinks of Reza as the ideal child and fantasizes that he is her son. She comes to think of his mother, Sirena - who is an up-and-coming conceptual artist in Europe - as her idealized self, the artist she might have been if she hadn't ended up taking care of her ailing mother. And she comes to think of Sirena's husband, Skandar, a visiting professor at Harvard, as her ideal man, and dreams of having sex with him. In a direct reference to Chekhov's story "The Black Monk," Nora describes the Shahids as her "three Black Monks" who for a brief period reawaken her to the possibilities of life. At 37, just when she thinks her life has prematurely closed, she feels as if a door were opening. Nora's relationship with the Shahids, which quickly begins to take on an obsessive coloration, is vaguely reminiscent of the one developed by the narrator of Ms. Messud's novella "The Hunters" toward a downstairs neighbor. Nora becomes manic and flushed with excitement whenever she is around one of the Shahids, and takes any missed meeting or call as a slight or cause for worry. She begins sharing an art studio with Sirena, who inspires her to get back to work on her own projects. She starts baby-sitting for Reza in the evening, and later allows Skandar to take her on long, meandering walks home in which they talk about politics and philosophy and ethics. Soon she covets not only Sirena's life - including her husband and her child - but her imagination as well. In response to Nora's infatuation with the Shahid family, her best friend, Didi, gently suggests that she's "making up stories" in her head, and Ms. Messud uses the question of Nora's unreliability as a narrator to address many of the same themes she's explored in her earlier work - namely, the subjectivity of the narratives people tell themselves about their lives, the ways they project their own wishes and fears onto others. We are reminded of how people create mythologies around themselves to explain (or rationalize) why things worked out the way they did, and of how identity is shaped not just by one's own impulses and dreams, but also by the expectations (whether spurned or embraced) of others. To what degree is Nora imposing her own fantasies on her account of her interactions with the Shahid family? Is the story we're reading a vague approximation of reality or a thoroughly warped vision filtered through the prism of Nora's unstable psyche? In getting Nora to help out on her big new project - a pretentious-sounding installation based on "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" that will make her an art world star - is Sirena using her worshipful friend and stealing her away from her own work? Or has the pushy and envious Nora insinuated herself into Sirena's project in the hope of enjoying some reflected glory? Are Sirena and Skandar going through a rough patch in their marriage that could make Skandar genuinely tempted to have an affair with Nora? Or is the couple in cahoots, playing out some more dangerous mental game with Nora? For that matter, are all such scenarios mere figments of Nora's overheated imagination? Such questions, like the novel's copious literary allusions, lend Nora's story a depth lacking in your everyday psychological thriller. But the dense, self-reflexive writing and the willfully commercial plot combine here to create what is, in the end, an intriguing but ungainly Frankenstein monster of a novel.
Guardian Review
This is a novel in which very little happens. Yet it is also an addictive page-turner, and written with such artistry that the reader can do little but succumb. Rarely has the mundane been so dazzling. It opens in the first person with a litany of foul-mouthed complaints that comes as a shock to anyone familiar with Messud's usual Jamesian prose style. Here is the story of an angry woman whose explosive rage settles into a sense of threat that pulls us along with it, eager to discover its source. "I want to make my nothingness count," the narrator warns. "Don't think it's impossible." Nora Eldridge is a "straight-A, strait-laced, good daughter" who has spent four years looking after her dying mother. Now 42 and responsible for her father, she is an elementary school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts; a frustrated artist dragging abandoned hopes, with no partner and a vivid life of the mind. In her "calcifying spinsterdom", she is the ubiquitous "woman upstairs": accommodating, anonymous, almost invisible. We return to the period five years before, when Nora is becoming aware of lost opportunities. Into her classroom walks eight-year-old Reza Shahid, a new pupil who instantly charms her. Reza's Lebanese father Skandar Shahid is an academic on a year's Harvard fellowship. More intriguingly, Sirena Shahid is an artist, wife, mother: everything that Nora is not. On meeting her, Nora feels the "voltage" of her presence, and an unequal friendship develops. They share a studio, where Sirena produces work on a vast scale while Nora fashions miniature dioramas requiring "hours of dollshouse labor". Nora. Doll's house. Get it? The novel is scattered with literary allusions. The theme of falling in love with a family is common among young writers, but with the distance of a more experienced practitioner, it feels like fresh territory. Living "the opiated husk of a life, the treadmill of the ordinary, a cage built of convention and consumerism and obligation and fear", Nora appoints the Shahids her saviours as her attachment develops an obsessive flavour reminiscent of Zoe Heller's lonely narrator in Notes on a Scandal. She greedily imbibes their certainty and style, while her idols naturally fail to understand the role they play in her imagination. Nora becomes their free babysitter and an unpaid helper on Sirena's "Wonderland" installation, the piece which is to make her name. Even after the Shahids' departure, Nora is imprisoned by her fixation on that "lost paradisiac year". Her awakening is delayed, and brutal. The Woman Upstairs is a brave and highly risky novel in that it eschews any significant plot, state-of-the-nation ambition or high concept. It is a strictly artistic endeavour that also works as an entertainment. Kick-starting the story with a rant is a clever device, but it's the quieter, brooding sense of foreboding, the intimation of disaster, that provides, along with the narrator's voice, the novel's engine. Reminiscent in some ways of The Bell Jar in its wry yet furious take on women's position in society, this is a strongly feminist novel that is neither didactic nor straightforwardly political. It is about creativity versus duty, compromise versus cruelty, the difficulty of reconciling an artistic life with a normal existence. Nora proposes that artistic success requires becoming "a ruthless person", in a world where girls are taught self-abnegation. Above all, The Woman Upstairs is about the "precious, hidden specialness" beneath the most prosaic of exteriors: the secret life of the mind. The prose here is more relaxed and vernacular than the precise, mesmeric lyricism of Messud's The Hunters or The Emperor's Children. It is an uncomfortable, erudite and deeply profound novel. Sometimes almost wilfully contemplative, its motifs are repetitive and its dark grip unfaltering. This is a world the reader so fully inhabits that it seems a helpline is all that's missing when it ends. Messud is a bigger name in the US than here, and The Emperor's Children was a New York Times bestseller. The Woman Upstairs is both quieter and braver; it roars in its own muted way, and dares to pin down things that are both excruciating and universal. Claire Messud should achieve literary giant status before too long. To paraphrase Nora, just watch her. Joanna Briscoe's latest novel is You (Bloomsbury). To order The Woman Upstairs for pounds 11.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop - Joanna Briscoe Caption: Captions: A quiet roar . . . Claire Messud at the Edinburgh book festival in 2006 We return to the period five years before, when [Nora Eldridge] is becoming aware of lost opportunities. Into her classroom walks eight-year-old Reza Shahid, a new pupil who instantly charms her. Reza's Lebanese father Skandar Shahid is an academic on a year's Harvard fellowship. More intriguingly, Sirena Shahid is an artist, wife, mother: everything that Nora is not. On meeting her, Nora feels the "voltage" of her presence, and an unequal friendship develops. They share a studio, where Sirena produces work on a vast scale while Nora fashions miniature dioramas requiring "hours of dollshouse labor". Nora. Doll's house. Get it? The novel is scattered with literary allusions. The theme of falling in love with a family is common among young writers, but with the distance of a more experienced practitioner, it feels like fresh territory. Living "the opiated husk of a life, the treadmill of the ordinary, a cage built of convention and consumerism and obligation and fear", Nora appoints the Shahids her saviours as her attachment develops an obsessive flavour reminiscent of Zoe Heller's lonely narrator in Notes on a Scandal. She greedily imbibes their certainty and style, while her idols naturally fail to understand the role they play in her imagination. Nora becomes their free babysitter and an unpaid helper on Sirena's "Wonderland" installation, the piece which is to make her name. Even after the Shahids' departure, Nora is imprisoned by her fixation on that "lost paradisiac year". Her awakening is delayed, and brutal. - Joanna Briscoe.
Kirkus Review
A self-described "good girl" lifts her mask in Messud's scarifying new novel (The Emperor's Children, 2006, etc.). "How angry am I?" Nora Eldridge rhetorically asks in her opening sentence. "You don't want to know." But she tells us anyway. Nora is furious with her dead mother, her elderly father and her estranged brother, none of whom seem to have done anything very terrible. Basically, Nora is furious with herself: for failing to commit to being an artist, for settling for life as a third-grade teacher in Cambridge, Mass., for lacking the guts even to be openly enraged. Instead, she is the woman upstairs, "whose trash is always tidy, who smiles brightly in the stairwell." So when the exotic Shahid family enters her life in the fall of 2004, Nora sees them as saviors. Reza is in her class; after another student attacks and calls the half-Lebanese boy "a terrorist," she meets his Italian mother, Sirena, the kind of bold, assertive artist Nora longs to be. They wind up sharing a studio, and Nora eventually neglects her own work to help Sirena with a vast installation called Wonderland. She's also drawn to Skandar, an academic whose one-year fellowship has brought his family to Cambridge from Paris. "So you're in love with Sirena, and you want to fuck her husband and steal her child," comments Nora's friend Didi after she confesses her intense feelings. It's nowhere near that simple, as the story unfolds to reveal Sirena as something of a user--and perhaps Skandar too, though it's unwise to credit Nora's jaundiced perceptions. Her untrustworthy, embittered narration, deliberately set up as a feminine counterpoint to the rantings of Dostoevsky's Underground Man, is an astonishing feat of creative imagination: at once self-lacerating and self-pitying, containing enough truth to induce squirms. Messud persuasively plunges us into the tortured psyche of a conflicted soul whose defiant closing assertion inspires little confidence that Nora can actually change her ways. Brilliant and terrifying.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Messud (The Emperor's Children) returns with another intimate and piercing novel. Nora Eldridge, an elementary schoolteacher, once dreamed of being an artist but put aside her own dreams and ambitions to care for others. Her life takes an unexpected turn when the cosmopolitan Shahid family moves in from Paris. Nora is fiercely drawn to their son, a student in her class; his mother, an accomplished artist; and his dashing father, about whom she can't help fantasizing. Nora tries to get as involved in their lives as she can, until she ultimately realizes the cost of living vicariously through others. Cassandra Campbell does a beautiful job of narrating Nora's inner struggles. The listener easily gets lost in the beauty of her voice and the conviction of her efforts. VERDICT Highly recommended for fans of literary fiction and taut drama. ["This quietly, tensely unfolding story is related in retrospect, so we know from the start that it has ended badly for Nora. The only question is how. Remarkably, Messud...lets us experience Nora's betrayal as if it were our own, and what finally happens really is a punch in the stomach," read the review of the Knopf hc, LJ Xpress Reviews, 4/26/13.-Ed.]-Erin Cataldi, Franklin Coll., IN (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1 How angry am I? You don't want to know. Nobody wants to know about that. I'm a good girl, I'm a nice girl, I'm a straight- A, strait- laced, good daughter, good career girl, and I never stole anybody's boyfriend and I never ran out on a girlfriend, and I put up with my parents' shit and my brother's shit, and I'm not a girl anyhow, I'm over forty fucking years old, and I'm good at my job and I'm great with kids and I held my mother's hand when she died, after four years of holding her hand while she was dying, and I speak to my father every day on the telephone-- every day, mind you, and what kind of weather do you have on your side of the river, because here it's pretty gray and a bit muggy too? It was supposed to say "Great Artist" on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say "such a good teacher/daughter/ friend" instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL. Don't all women feel the same? The only difference is how much we know we feel it, how in touch we are with our fury. We're all furies, except the ones who are too damned foolish, and my worry now is that we're brainwashing them from the cradle, and in the end even the ones who are smart will be too damned foolish. What do I mean? I mean the second graders at Appleton Elementary, sometimes the first graders even, and by the time they get to my classroom, to the third grade, they're well and truly gone--they're full of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry and French manicures and cute outfits and they care how their hair looks! In the third grade. They care more about their hair or their shoes than about galaxies or caterpillars or hieroglyphics. How did all that revolutionary talk of the seventies land us in a place where being female means playing dumb and looking good? Even worse on your tombstone than "dutiful daughter" is "looked good"; everyone used to know that. But we're lost in a world of appearances now. That's why I'm so angry, really--not because of all the chores and all the making nice and all the duty of being a woman--or rather, of being me-- because maybe these are the burdens of being human. Really I'm angry because I've tried so hard to get out of the hall of mirrors, this sham and pretend of the world, or of my world, on the East Coast of the United States of America in the first decade of the twenty- first century. And behind every mirror is another fucking mirror, and down every corridor is another corridor, and the Fun House isn't fun anymore and it isn't even funny, but there doesn't seem to be a door marked EXIT. At the fair each summer when I was a kid, we visited the Fun House, with its creepy grinning plaster face, two stories high. You walked in through its mouth, between its giant teeth, along its hot-pink tongue. Just from that face, you should've known. It was supposed to be a lark, but it was terrifying. The floors buckled or they lurched from side to side, and the walls were crooked, and the rooms were painted to confuse perspective. Lights flashed, horns blared, in the narrow, vibrating hallways lined with fattening mirrors and elongating mirrors and inside- out upside- down mirrors. Sometimes the ceiling fell or the floor rose, or both happened at once and I thought I'd be squashed like a bug. The Fun House was scarier by far than the Haunted House, not least because I was supposed to enjoy it. I just wanted to find the way out. But the doors marked EXIT led only to further crazy rooms, to endless moving corridors. There was one route through the Fun House, relentless to the very end. I've finally come to understand that life itself is the Fun House. All you want is that door marked EXIT, the escape to a place where Real Life will be; and you can never find it. No: let me correct that. In recent years, there was a door, there were doors, and I took them and I believed in them, and I believed for a stretch that I'd managed to get out into Reality--and God, the bliss and terror of that, the intensity of that: it felt so different-- until I suddenly realized I'd been stuck in the Fun House all along. I'd been tricked. The door marked EXIT hadn't been an exit at all. Excerpted from The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
