At first, I adored this book. Here is an excerpt from the first page; the main character, 40-year-old Nora, says, "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 in big letters on that grave, too, is F--- YOU ALL."
I was hooked! I even wrote about the same thing into my own novel, Dakota Blues, wherein my protag laments that her headstone would say, "She was a good girl." Aren't we women afraid of this, and don't you suspect it's hugely disproportionate to men feeling the same way?
At the beginning, I was entranced by Claire Messud's writing ability, and as I settled in, I was sure I would be profoundly moved by the storytelling. Some of Nora's thoughts are recognizable in the gut, in a way that is almost impossible to describe. For example, I know EXACTLY what she means when she compares life to a Fun House, but not in a good way, ending with, "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."
Unfortunately, the book didn't turn out to be as compelling as I'd hoped, because it is, unfortunately, somewhat tedious. But it was a worthwhile read nonetheless, and here's why: the entire story is about perception; how people interpret life experiences differently. Warning: spoilers ahead.
Profoundly affected by the perception that her embittered mother had been deprived of the chance to realize her dreams, Nora deludes herself that she is living an independent life, free and unfettered by family, love, or passion. However, we see she's deluded, when her father informs her that her mother (now dead) had been a virtual tyrant, doing exactly what she pleased and directing every aspect of his life. Nora refuses to believe this. When her father laments Nora's solitary lifestyle, Nora thinks he is "unable to see, as my mother would have, that I had almost fulfilled her dream of independence..."
In truth, Nora lives an impoverished life where in the pursuit of such "independence," she avoids attachments of any kind. When in middle-age she learns that her father saw her mother as a benevolent dictator/bully, Nora rejects that depiction as her dad's delusion. But is it? Who is right? And that is a recurring theme throughout this book. What is reality? Who is to say?
Because the unwitting Nora is so hungry, she is drawn into the lives of the aptly named Sirena and her family. Through them she can trick herself into thinking she has love, motherhood, and family. Sirena is an artist, and Nora gives herself over to helping Sirena create her magnum opus. However, she is being used under the guise of friendship. At the end of the story, Nora finally sees, with shattering clarity, that she is nothing but a useful servant, and the book ends with Nora boiling with rage, determined to finally live.
In this sense it's a satisfying character arc. However, the stream-of-consciousness writing and belaboring of specific points makes it a somewhat tedious read. For example, I believe the main purpose for the character of Skandar, Sirena's husband, (Nora's frustrated sexuality aside), is to make the point that reality can be distorted and perceptions unreliable. Fine. However, Skandar goes on at extreme length, lecturing Nora. Here's an example:
"So if you're me, how you deal with that is, I'll look at how we talk about (history). I'll study the history of history, the ways that we tell the stories, and don't tell other stories, and I'll try to understand what it says about us, to tell one story rather than another, to tell it one way rather than another. I'll ask the questions about what is ethical, about who decides what is ethical, I'll ask whether it is possible, really, to have an ethics in the matter of history."
This is only about one-fifth of the discussion. It's difficult to maintain one's attention throughout, especially when I wanted to yell at Nora, "freakin' DO something, Nora, you doormat!" But the story is about a woman living an oblivious life, her perceptions distorted by her mother's influence. Nora sleepwalks through her life, finally realizing in her early forties that she has been played, and her rage is so great I'd hold out little hope that the second half of her life could be healthy, satisfying or normal to any degree.
One side-issue: some disgruntled reviewers have commented on Nora's unlikeability. Could anything be less important? This is a character study. Nora is interesting in that she represents the shriveled husk of an unlived life. Liking her is beside the point.
In summary, I'm fascinated by the idea of women sleepwalking through their lives, and then realizing sometime in the second half the error they've made, and correcting it. This book appealed to me in that sense, but I think it was too long, too self-indulgent, thus Messud risked losing the attention and dedication of her reader.
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The Woman Upstairs Hardcover – Deckle Edge, April 30, 2013
by
Claire Messud
(Author)
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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.
- Print length272 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherKnopf
- Publication dateApril 30, 2013
- Dimensions6.51 x 1.01 x 9.52 inches
- ISBN-100307596907
- ISBN-13978-0307596901
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, May 2013: If this ferocious novel were to have a subtitle, it would be: No More Ms. Nice Guy. "How angry am I? You don’t want to know. Nobody wants to know about that," barks Nora Eldridge, our 42-year-old protagonist, an aesthete-wannabe who has slid into the bourgeois suburban life of a schoolteacher. Solipsistically lonely, Nora befriends--a polite term here for what is more like "stalks"--the artist-mother of one of her students; she also insinuates herself into the life of the woman's husband. That trouble will ensue is obvious to everyone but Nora, who for all her paranoia, is stunningly blind about using and being used. But in the end, maybe Nora doesn’t even care what she has suffered; at least, for once, she has lived, as she will continue to do in the minds of all of us who've read about her. --Sara Nelson
From Booklist
*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.” --Donna Seaman
From Bookforum
If I have sounded like an equivocal admirer of Messud's until now, let me hereby announce my full conversion to fandom with her latest novel,The Woman Upstairs. For one thing, it is something none of her other fiction has been, which is an absolute page-turner, from its grab-you-by-the-collar opening--"How angry am I? You don't want to know. Nobody wants to know about that"--to its final rumination on the creative uses of anger: "a great boil of rage like the sun's fire in me." For another, it may well be the first truly feminist (in the best, least didactic sense) novel I have read in ages--the novel candid about sex and the intricacies of female desire that Virginia Woolf hoped someone would write, given a room and income of her own. The Woman Upstairs takes on, at full throttle, the ways in which women are socialized into being accomodating "nice girls" and the ruthlessness--the "myopia"--that is necessary to pursue artistic ambition. It shows Claire Messud at the height of her considerable powers, articulating the quandary of being alive and sentient, covetous and confused in the twenty-first century. The Woman Upstairs is an extraordinary novel, a psychological suspense story of the highest sort that will leave you thinking about its implications for days afterward. --Daphne Merkin
Review
“Fantastic—one of those seemingly small stories that so burst with rage and desire that they barely squeeze between hard covers. The prose is impeccable. . . . Messud writes about happiness, and about infatuation—about love—more convincingly than any author I’ve encountered in years. She fills [her] protagonist with an inner life so rich and furious that you will never again nod hello in the hall to ‘the woman upstairs’ without thinking twice. . . Is Nora’s entrancement erotic, or bigger and stranger than sex? I’m not telling. Read the book.” —Lionel Shriver, National Public Radio, “All Things Considered”
“Bracing . . . not so much the story of the road not taken as that of the longed-for road that never appeared. . . . Nora’s anger electrifies the narrative, and Messud masterfully controls the tension and pace. In this fierce, feminist novel, the reader serves as Nora’s confessor, and it’s a pleasure to listen to someone so eloquent, whose insights about how women are valued in society and art are sharp.” —Jenny Shank, Dallas News
“An elegant winner of a novel . . . quietly, tensely unfolding . . . 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. Highly recommended.” —Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
“Utterly compelling . . . Crisply illuminated.” —Katherine Rowland, Guernica
“Messud has many gifts as a novelist: She writes well, dramatizes, has a sharp ear, a literary critic’s knack for marshaling and reverberating themes and, most crucially, a broad and deep empathy that enables her to portray a wide range of characters from the inside. . . . The Woman Upstairs is first-rate: It asks unsettling, unanswerable questions: How much do those who are not our family or our partners really owe us? How close can we really be to them before we start to become needy or creepy? The characters are fully alive.” —John Broening, The Denver Post
“Messud is a tremendously smart, accomplished writer, [and] Nora’s fury explodes from the very first sentence of The Woman Upstairs. . . . The novel gives a voiceless woman a chance to howl.” —Yvonne Zipp, The Christian Science Monitor
“Engrossing . . . Think of her as the woman who leans out: the A student who puts others’ needs first, plays by the rules, teaches instead of doing. Through the ensuing drama, which includes one of the more shocking betrayals in recent fiction, Messud raises questions about women’s still-circumscribed roles and the price of success.” —Kim Hubbard, People (A People’s Pick)
“Messud’s account of [Nora’s] search for recognition and release is as tight and vivid as Nora’s pent-up passion. I was pulled in.” —Mary Rawson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Messud’s crystallization of how it feels to crash into a midlife reckoning that resonated most and haunted me in the days after finishing her mesmerizing novel. . . . It boils and ‘burns,’ and Messud gives us a double whammy to ensure we feel the pangs of midlife. . . . Messud is most interested in the collision between our inner lives and our reality. . . . While it was Messud’s achingly beautiful characters that drew me in, it was her portrait of an inner life free to swell, untethered to the realities of children, a spouse and a mortgage that made me think. Seeing Nora live so obsessively in her self-made dioramas in search of joy made me find refuge. For those who live in leafy Cambridge surrounded by alluring visiting intellectuals from afar, students and Somerville artists, it must be said that there is a great writer of our times in our midst who is a nice girl, who never walked out on a friend. Just don’t get her angry.” —Heidi Legg, The Huffington Post
“Clear-eyed . . . a passionate and skillful description of female ambition and women artists at work . . . Like Messud herself, Nora knows some women need to stay on fire.” —Britt Peterson, The New Republic
“Spellbinding, psychologically acute . . . Like Emily Dickenson Nora’s heightened state lets her see things others miss. [Yet] how much of Nora’s fantasy is true—and to what degree the Shahids must share the blame when it’s not—is the real subject of Messud’s novel. She may evoke [Ralph] Ellison, but as is often true with her work, the writer who comes to mind is James—with his often unreliable narrators and focus on the disconnect between American innocence and European experience. . . . By novel’s end, Nora has every reason to be angry with the Shahids. But Messud also makes clear that if Nora is living her life upstairs rather than down on the main floor, she has even more reason to be angry with herself . . . Exquisitely rendered.” –Mike Fischer, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Nora’s story could also be every woman’s story. . . . [She] is angry, but her anger rekindles her spirit and makes her alive, makes her determined to emerge from her upstairs world. Readers will root for Nora, hoping that her anger will sustain her to live an authentic, felt, and even ruthless life as the artist she has been afraid to be. A masterful, honest look at one woman’s desire to be seen by herself—and others—for who she really is.” —Amy Goodfellow Wagner, Examiner
“Riveting . . . Messud is adept at evoking complex psychological territory, and here favors a controlled and notably unreliable style of narration. She is interested in the identities that women construct for themselves, and in the maddening chasm that often divides intensity of aspiration from reality of achievement.” —The New Yorker
“Smoldering . . . a furious account of betrayal, the true source of which is withheld until the final pages. . . . Messud crams much into her portrait of Nora’s life: tart meditations on the creative impulse and the artistic ego, on the interplay between reality and fantasy and the often-pitiful limits of human communication. . . . Nora’s world is piercingly evoked.” —Hephzibah Anderson, Bloomberg Businessweek
“You know a Woman Upstairs; maybe you are one. . . . This is not a simple story of a sidekick woman thwarted by her own fear, and the betrayal that haunts the ‘Shahid years’ explodes in a sudden, cruel flash, forcing Nora’s long-simmering anger to boil over into a justified rage. Messud is an immensely talented writer, and in Nora she gives us a compelling, complex, and unforgettable narrator. The Woman Upstairs is a brilliantly paced story of fearsome love and obsessive longing, and the boundaries and sacrifices of what is to be a woman and to be an artist in the world.” —Amanda Bullock, Everyday eBook
“[A] powerful psychological thriller . . . As in a fairy tale, Nora becomes spellbound by a family that seems to embody what she is missing. The power of self-deception is one of the key themes. . . . This is not just a novel of real psychological insight. It is also a supremely well-crafted page-turner with a shocker of an ending.” —Julia M. Klein, The Boston Globe
“Thrums with fury . . . Startling: a psychological and intellectual thriller.” —Los Angeles Times
“Tightly focused and intensely first-person . . . Nora storms onto the page in a fury to tell us the story of a few months that changed her life. . . . The stage is set for a terrible betrayal, and the ending delivers it. The writing in this book is on fire, and the connections it makes—a Chekhov short story, a Larkin poem, Alice in Wonderland—pop like intellectual fireworks from the page.” —Marion Winik, Newsday
“Hypnotic. In Nora, Messud has conjured a self-contradictory yet acutely familiar character; we’ve all met someone like her, if we aren’t like her ourselves. . . . An air of imminent betrayal hangs over the novel. Yet even as she describes the emotional circles of her obsession, Nora does not become monstrous or pathological or even (like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man) absurd. This, in a way, is her tragedy. Deliverance when it does come takes the most unlikely form. Like Ibsen’s Nora, Messud’s walks offstage in a moment of pure potential. What will she do? I can’t begin to imagine, and that, surely, is the point.” —Laura Miller, Salon
“A rare work of fiction seemingly destined to become a cultural benchmark, a byword even. It provides an indelible label for a member of society (and a long recurring figure in literature) who has somehow been confined to anonymity. Messud’s coinage—the Woman Upstairs—is so broadly defining and so necessary that even those who never read the novel may soon find themselves making unwitting use of it. . . . [Nora’s] narration hisses with rage for her hypocritical, accommodating former self and for anyone who has ever taken advantage of her. . . . Once Nora is well lost in love, the author takes us steadily, suspensefully, heartbreakingly toward a jolting conclusion [and] a breathtaking act of betrayal. . . . The Woman Upstairs is a trenchant exploration into the mercenary nature of artistic creation. . . . [It] updates the dictum of Virginia Woolf’s manifesto: It’s not only a little money and a room of one’s own that women need to produce art—it’s a willingness to use and manipulate other people; it’s a capacity for cruelty. . . . Messud’s strongest influence here is Philip Roth. [She] seems to have drawn from [his] outrageous exfoliations of ferocity and contempt in fashioning Nora’s voice. [But] of course, Messud’s unsparingly frank narration comes from a woman, which makes the novel a kind of rejoinder to Roth’s decidedly male-centric universe. . . . The Woman Upstairs is unquestionably a breakthrough for the writer. It forces itself on you, demands your attention, impresses and irritates. There is a genuine sense of unease in these pages, of something solid being overturned by the sheer force of Nora’s rage. . . . Causing a disturbance is the point. It is an altogether impolitic piece of artistry. It is a big, defiant gesture of the sort that women like Nora fear they no longer have within them.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“Every new Claire Messud novel is a reason to rejoice. . . . Her prose is so exquisite and immersive that it can make you forget that you’re sitting at home with a book in your hands. . . . [Nora’s] plight elicits empathy, and her palpable disappointment resounds in every sentence. . . . While The Woman Upstairs is set in our all-too-real world, something about Messud’s fiction is reminiscent of filmmaker Wes Anderson’s imaginary wonderlands. Maybe it’s the sheen of technical perfection and old-fashioned dedication to craft. . . . Colorful and fascinating, . . . Nora Eldridge has to be one of the richest and most fully human characters to come along in years. . . . Messud writes with the patience of a saint and that she does so without telegraphing what is to come makes her worthy of serious veneration. The pinnacle of this slow-burning plot comes across as simultaneously shocking and inevitable. . . . These characters and their problems are inseparable from the political and social upheaval around them. The prose here never calls undue attention to itself, and The Woman Upstairs dazzles without outwardly trying. It also solidifies Messud’s place among our greatest contemporary writers.” —Andrew Ervin, The Miami Herald
“Intimate . . . Messud’s cosmopolitan sensibilities infuse her fiction with a refreshing cultural fluidity. . . . The Woman Upstairs opens with extraordinary heat and momentum . . . [and] brims with energy and ideas. . . . A suspenseful psychological thriller . . . Brilliant.” —Jane Ciabattari, NPR
“Exhilarating . . . Messud’s previous novels, extraordinarily intelligent and well-crafted, are characterized by rationed or distant emotion. [But] The Woman Upstairs is utterly different—its language urgent, its conflicts outsize and unmooring, its mood incendiary. This psychologically charged story feels like a liberation. Messud’s prose grabs the reader by the collar . . . Reading Nora’s turbulent testament of belief and betrayal, you feel less like a spectator than a witness. . . . In this ingenious, disquieting novel, Messud has assembled an intricate puzzle of self-belief and self-doubt, showing the peril of seeking your own image in someone else’s distorted mirror—or even, sometimes, in your own.” —Liesl Schillinger, The New York Times Book Review
“From its opening lines, Messud’s new novel grips like a choke hold. . . .The most unlikely hero, Nora, self-identifies with scornful wit and rage as the titular Woman Upstairs. But oh how Messud, whose last novel was the sharp and brilliant The Emperor’s Children, gives her woman room to roar. . . . Sirena awakens in her an unapologetic lust of life that Nora was previously too good or too scared to claim. The narrative burns toward an inevitable betrayal of startling proportions, one that instead of diminishing Nora lights her ablaze. This is a book sweating with rage, and an exhilarating one. Read it in an openmouthed gulp. After the final powerful paragraphs, in which Nora howls in galvanized fury, throw it down and have a drink, or a dreamless nap. Don’t be surprised if you then pick it back up and start all over again. A” —Karen Valby, Entertainment Weekly
“In the ongoing debate over whether or not women can ‘have it all’ comes a Molotov cocktail thrown by an unlikely provocateur: Claire Messud’s new novel . . . of friendship and betrayal . . . [which] posits that the natural state of womanhood, at least after age 40, is to have nothing, and that satisfaction of any sort can come only via self-deception. . . . ‘I’m not crazy,’ Nora declares at the beginning of the novel. ‘Angry yes, crazy no.’ In Sirena—self-possessed, artistically fulfilled, a mother, foreign, Nora has found the proof that she need not view herself as a woman society has rejected, an archetypal ‘Woman Upstairs with her cats and pots of tea and her goddamn Garnet Hill catalog.’ The Woman Upstairs avoids moral judgment. [It is] simultaneously a justification for extreme acts in the name of friendship, and Nora’s rallying cry for women like her to rage against the world that has been handed to them. . . . Nora is both sympathetic and horrific. She is at once raising a voice to deep-seated misogyny against aging women, and confirming every bias. Messud’s ability to find the frailty, even the artist, in Nora, makes Sirena more complex as well. For all her perfection, Sirena’s rebukes seem, somehow, unconscionably depraved. . . . The novel offers no comfort in the end; it is, at last, the story of a woman for whom reality and a rich fantasy life have merged.” —Daniel D’Addario, New York Observer
“For practical advice about how women can thrive and control their destinies, check out Lean In by Facebook’s ever-gracious COO, Sheryl Sandberg. But maybe after a hard day of believing in yourself, you just want to luxuriate in a fire of cleansing rage. Go ahead: Push the billionaire’s affirmations aside and listen instead to the she-devil in Claire Messud’s ferocious new novel. Lean in—she’ll singe your eyebrows off. [Nora] may [have] rage, but it’s fantastically smart rage—anger that never distorts, even in the upper registers. When Nora complains about women like herself who dutifully tuck themselves away, she ricochets from Charlotte Bronte to Jean Rhys to Henry David Thoreau to Ralph Ellison. Wherever she digs, she hits rich veins of indignation. [Thisis] a tightly wound monologue with the intensity of a novella that reads more like a curse. . . . Anger provides the heat, but the novel’s real energy comes from its intellectual fuel, its all-consuming analytical drive . . . Nora’s self-knowledge keeps the reader off-balance. . . . Even as that psychological drama races toward a dark climax, Nora seduces us with her piercing assessment of the way young women are acculturated, the way older women are trapped. It doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman: It’s hard not to feel your own anxieties and fragile hopes being flayed by these braided strands of confession and blame. Lean in. I dare you.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“Messud knows how to make fiction out of the clash of civilizations. Her heroines . . . inhabit the inky space between continents, physical and generational. Survivors to the core, they cling to the ledge even as their worlds are upended. . . . Messud’s writing shows a growing mastery of mood. Comedy, pathos, sadness: nothing seems beyond her. Her new book has all this—and more. Nora’s dormant rage, which her mother warned would one day awaken, drives her on and on. The Woman Upstairs is not a pretty read, but that is precisely what makes it so hard to put down.” —The Economist
“Terrifyingly perceptive . . . The Emperor’s Children is a quite good novel, [but] The Woman Upstairs does far more with a smaller cast [and] has much greater weight. Messud wants to make a point that even successful people can suffer from a lethal celebrity complex. Nora Eldridge is a kind of Madame Bovary for our time, someone who dreams not of romantic passion but of personal fame, in which the envy of the less fortunate figures importantly. . . . Nora is like Emma Bovary in the conviction that she needs the love of glamorous and important individuals to give her life meaning. . . . One particular triumph of The Woman Upstairs is that Messud’s heroine is so sympathetic, and so eloquent and convincing, that the depth of her illusions is not always apparent. . . . Because Messud has lent Nora her own outstanding gifts as a writer we cannot help believing what she tells us, at least for a while.” —Alison Lurie, The New York Review of Books
“The new novel by the author of The Emperor’s Children is like Gone Girl meets The Bell Jar: A lonely teacher’s fixation on a student’s family slowly drives her insane. Messud’s magic power? Keeping her flawed protagonist relatable to the very end.” —Megan Angelo, Glamour
“In this literary page-turner, a Boston teacher with dreams of becoming an artist is first enamored of, and then feels betrayed by, a seductive couple who’ve relocated from Paris.” —Abbe Wright, O, The Oprah Magazine
“Almost without knowing it, I was hungry for Nora Eldridge, the hero of Messud’s new novel. The title names an archetype: the nice, unmarried lady on the third floor who smiles in the lobby and is quickly forgotten. Nora is a caring schoolteacher seemingly content to look after her ailing father, her dreams of living the life of an artist subsumed by the act of simply living a life. Bitterly funny and self-aware, she claims to be having a ‘Lucy Jordan moment,’ name-checking the Marianne Faithfull song . . . It seems right that Messud’s follow-up to The Emperor’s Children grasps furiously at life and punches back at encroaching age. In The Woman Upstairs, she abandons the polyphonic narration of the previous novel for first-person carpe diem prose that is leaner and meaner. . . . Nora [is] exhilarating, a fiery heroine who arrives to serve [both] middle-aged readers, and the young women who will soon see what it’s like when the spotlight swings away, urging us to make the most of that time between here and the finish line.” —Katrina Onstad, Toronto Life
“Corrosively funny . . . Fifty years ago, Simone de Beauvoir faulted creative women for their unwillingness to ‘dare to irritate, explore, explode.’ Two generations later, anger this combustible still feels refreshing.” —Megan O’Grady, Vogue
“Heartfelt and profound. . . . From the outset, it’s been clear that Claire Messud has all the necessary equipment—a fertile imagination, a grown-up sensibility, and writerly ambition in spades—to write very good fiction, perhaps even a novel that defined our times. Her latest novel is an absolute page-turner, from its grab-you-by-the-collar opening to its final rumination on the creative uses of anger. . . . For another, it may well be the first truly feminist (in the best, least didactic sense) novel I have read in ages—the novel, candid about sex and the intricacies of female desire, that Virginia Woolf hoped someone would write, given a room and income of her own. The Woman Upstairs takes on, at full throttle, the ways in which women are socialized into being accommodating ‘nice girls,’ and the ruthlessness—the ‘myopia’—that is necessary to pursue artistic ambition. It shows Messud at the height of her considerable powers, articulating the quandary of being alive and sentient, covetous and confused in the twenty-first century. . . . The Woman Upstairs is an extraordinary novel, a psychological suspense story of the highest sort that will leave you thinking about its implications for days afterward. Messud’s skills are all on display here, [in] a work of fiction that is not just beautifully observed but also palpably inhabited by its gifted writer in a manner she has not quite dared attempt before.” —Daphne Merkin, Bookforum
“With exhilarating velocity, fury, and wit, the superlative Messud immolates an iconic figure—the good, quiet, self-sacrificing woman—in this acid bath of a novel, while taking on the vicissitudes of family life and the paradoxes of art. Nora [is] our archly funny, venomous, and raging narrator . . . 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.’” —Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
“Claire Messud’s daring, Jamesian new novel takes so many chances and provokes so many questions. . . . Messud is a truth teller about the ruthlessness of art [and] makes a key point about creative work: It means smashing boundaries, using imagination to remake the world. . . . Messud is such a gifted painter of our choices and their consequences. She’s never gone this deep before in showing us how our reality and our pipe dreams intersect. Her portrait of Nora Eldridge, a decent woman who has perhaps crossed the wrong bridges in her life, would move stone. What’s going to become of Nora? What will the Shahids do to her? The Woman Upstairs is Claire Messud’s greatest novel.” —Dennis Haritou, Three Guys One Book
“A self-described ‘good girl’ lifts her mask in Messud’s new novel. ‘How angry am I?’ Nora Eldridge rhetorically asks in her opening sentence. ‘You don’t want to know.’ Nora is furious with herself: for failing to commit to being an artist, for settling for life as a third-grade teacher, 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, 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. . . . Nora’s untrustworthy narration, 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 . . . Brilliant and terrifying.” —Kirkus (starred review)
“Bracing . . . not so much the story of the road not taken as that of the longed-for road that never appeared. . . . Nora’s anger electrifies the narrative, and Messud masterfully controls the tension and pace. In this fierce, feminist novel, the reader serves as Nora’s confessor, and it’s a pleasure to listen to someone so eloquent, whose insights about how women are valued in society and art are sharp.” —Jenny Shank, Dallas News
“An elegant winner of a novel . . . quietly, tensely unfolding . . . 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. Highly recommended.” —Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
“Utterly compelling . . . Crisply illuminated.” —Katherine Rowland, Guernica
“Messud has many gifts as a novelist: She writes well, dramatizes, has a sharp ear, a literary critic’s knack for marshaling and reverberating themes and, most crucially, a broad and deep empathy that enables her to portray a wide range of characters from the inside. . . . The Woman Upstairs is first-rate: It asks unsettling, unanswerable questions: How much do those who are not our family or our partners really owe us? How close can we really be to them before we start to become needy or creepy? The characters are fully alive.” —John Broening, The Denver Post
“Messud is a tremendously smart, accomplished writer, [and] Nora’s fury explodes from the very first sentence of The Woman Upstairs. . . . The novel gives a voiceless woman a chance to howl.” —Yvonne Zipp, The Christian Science Monitor
“Engrossing . . . Think of her as the woman who leans out: the A student who puts others’ needs first, plays by the rules, teaches instead of doing. Through the ensuing drama, which includes one of the more shocking betrayals in recent fiction, Messud raises questions about women’s still-circumscribed roles and the price of success.” —Kim Hubbard, People (A People’s Pick)
“Messud’s account of [Nora’s] search for recognition and release is as tight and vivid as Nora’s pent-up passion. I was pulled in.” —Mary Rawson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Messud’s crystallization of how it feels to crash into a midlife reckoning that resonated most and haunted me in the days after finishing her mesmerizing novel. . . . It boils and ‘burns,’ and Messud gives us a double whammy to ensure we feel the pangs of midlife. . . . Messud is most interested in the collision between our inner lives and our reality. . . . While it was Messud’s achingly beautiful characters that drew me in, it was her portrait of an inner life free to swell, untethered to the realities of children, a spouse and a mortgage that made me think. Seeing Nora live so obsessively in her self-made dioramas in search of joy made me find refuge. For those who live in leafy Cambridge surrounded by alluring visiting intellectuals from afar, students and Somerville artists, it must be said that there is a great writer of our times in our midst who is a nice girl, who never walked out on a friend. Just don’t get her angry.” —Heidi Legg, The Huffington Post
“Clear-eyed . . . a passionate and skillful description of female ambition and women artists at work . . . Like Messud herself, Nora knows some women need to stay on fire.” —Britt Peterson, The New Republic
“Spellbinding, psychologically acute . . . Like Emily Dickenson Nora’s heightened state lets her see things others miss. [Yet] how much of Nora’s fantasy is true—and to what degree the Shahids must share the blame when it’s not—is the real subject of Messud’s novel. She may evoke [Ralph] Ellison, but as is often true with her work, the writer who comes to mind is James—with his often unreliable narrators and focus on the disconnect between American innocence and European experience. . . . By novel’s end, Nora has every reason to be angry with the Shahids. But Messud also makes clear that if Nora is living her life upstairs rather than down on the main floor, she has even more reason to be angry with herself . . . Exquisitely rendered.” –Mike Fischer, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Nora’s story could also be every woman’s story. . . . [She] is angry, but her anger rekindles her spirit and makes her alive, makes her determined to emerge from her upstairs world. Readers will root for Nora, hoping that her anger will sustain her to live an authentic, felt, and even ruthless life as the artist she has been afraid to be. A masterful, honest look at one woman’s desire to be seen by herself—and others—for who she really is.” —Amy Goodfellow Wagner, Examiner
“Riveting . . . Messud is adept at evoking complex psychological territory, and here favors a controlled and notably unreliable style of narration. She is interested in the identities that women construct for themselves, and in the maddening chasm that often divides intensity of aspiration from reality of achievement.” —The New Yorker
“Smoldering . . . a furious account of betrayal, the true source of which is withheld until the final pages. . . . Messud crams much into her portrait of Nora’s life: tart meditations on the creative impulse and the artistic ego, on the interplay between reality and fantasy and the often-pitiful limits of human communication. . . . Nora’s world is piercingly evoked.” —Hephzibah Anderson, Bloomberg Businessweek
“You know a Woman Upstairs; maybe you are one. . . . This is not a simple story of a sidekick woman thwarted by her own fear, and the betrayal that haunts the ‘Shahid years’ explodes in a sudden, cruel flash, forcing Nora’s long-simmering anger to boil over into a justified rage. Messud is an immensely talented writer, and in Nora she gives us a compelling, complex, and unforgettable narrator. The Woman Upstairs is a brilliantly paced story of fearsome love and obsessive longing, and the boundaries and sacrifices of what is to be a woman and to be an artist in the world.” —Amanda Bullock, Everyday eBook
“[A] powerful psychological thriller . . . As in a fairy tale, Nora becomes spellbound by a family that seems to embody what she is missing. The power of self-deception is one of the key themes. . . . This is not just a novel of real psychological insight. It is also a supremely well-crafted page-turner with a shocker of an ending.” —Julia M. Klein, The Boston Globe
“Thrums with fury . . . Startling: a psychological and intellectual thriller.” —Los Angeles Times
“Tightly focused and intensely first-person . . . Nora storms onto the page in a fury to tell us the story of a few months that changed her life. . . . The stage is set for a terrible betrayal, and the ending delivers it. The writing in this book is on fire, and the connections it makes—a Chekhov short story, a Larkin poem, Alice in Wonderland—pop like intellectual fireworks from the page.” —Marion Winik, Newsday
“Hypnotic. In Nora, Messud has conjured a self-contradictory yet acutely familiar character; we’ve all met someone like her, if we aren’t like her ourselves. . . . An air of imminent betrayal hangs over the novel. Yet even as she describes the emotional circles of her obsession, Nora does not become monstrous or pathological or even (like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man) absurd. This, in a way, is her tragedy. Deliverance when it does come takes the most unlikely form. Like Ibsen’s Nora, Messud’s walks offstage in a moment of pure potential. What will she do? I can’t begin to imagine, and that, surely, is the point.” —Laura Miller, Salon
“A rare work of fiction seemingly destined to become a cultural benchmark, a byword even. It provides an indelible label for a member of society (and a long recurring figure in literature) who has somehow been confined to anonymity. Messud’s coinage—the Woman Upstairs—is so broadly defining and so necessary that even those who never read the novel may soon find themselves making unwitting use of it. . . . [Nora’s] narration hisses with rage for her hypocritical, accommodating former self and for anyone who has ever taken advantage of her. . . . Once Nora is well lost in love, the author takes us steadily, suspensefully, heartbreakingly toward a jolting conclusion [and] a breathtaking act of betrayal. . . . The Woman Upstairs is a trenchant exploration into the mercenary nature of artistic creation. . . . [It] updates the dictum of Virginia Woolf’s manifesto: It’s not only a little money and a room of one’s own that women need to produce art—it’s a willingness to use and manipulate other people; it’s a capacity for cruelty. . . . Messud’s strongest influence here is Philip Roth. [She] seems to have drawn from [his] outrageous exfoliations of ferocity and contempt in fashioning Nora’s voice. [But] of course, Messud’s unsparingly frank narration comes from a woman, which makes the novel a kind of rejoinder to Roth’s decidedly male-centric universe. . . . The Woman Upstairs is unquestionably a breakthrough for the writer. It forces itself on you, demands your attention, impresses and irritates. There is a genuine sense of unease in these pages, of something solid being overturned by the sheer force of Nora’s rage. . . . Causing a disturbance is the point. It is an altogether impolitic piece of artistry. It is a big, defiant gesture of the sort that women like Nora fear they no longer have within them.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“Every new Claire Messud novel is a reason to rejoice. . . . Her prose is so exquisite and immersive that it can make you forget that you’re sitting at home with a book in your hands. . . . [Nora’s] plight elicits empathy, and her palpable disappointment resounds in every sentence. . . . While The Woman Upstairs is set in our all-too-real world, something about Messud’s fiction is reminiscent of filmmaker Wes Anderson’s imaginary wonderlands. Maybe it’s the sheen of technical perfection and old-fashioned dedication to craft. . . . Colorful and fascinating, . . . Nora Eldridge has to be one of the richest and most fully human characters to come along in years. . . . Messud writes with the patience of a saint and that she does so without telegraphing what is to come makes her worthy of serious veneration. The pinnacle of this slow-burning plot comes across as simultaneously shocking and inevitable. . . . These characters and their problems are inseparable from the political and social upheaval around them. The prose here never calls undue attention to itself, and The Woman Upstairs dazzles without outwardly trying. It also solidifies Messud’s place among our greatest contemporary writers.” —Andrew Ervin, The Miami Herald
“Intimate . . . Messud’s cosmopolitan sensibilities infuse her fiction with a refreshing cultural fluidity. . . . The Woman Upstairs opens with extraordinary heat and momentum . . . [and] brims with energy and ideas. . . . A suspenseful psychological thriller . . . Brilliant.” —Jane Ciabattari, NPR
“Exhilarating . . . Messud’s previous novels, extraordinarily intelligent and well-crafted, are characterized by rationed or distant emotion. [But] The Woman Upstairs is utterly different—its language urgent, its conflicts outsize and unmooring, its mood incendiary. This psychologically charged story feels like a liberation. Messud’s prose grabs the reader by the collar . . . Reading Nora’s turbulent testament of belief and betrayal, you feel less like a spectator than a witness. . . . In this ingenious, disquieting novel, Messud has assembled an intricate puzzle of self-belief and self-doubt, showing the peril of seeking your own image in someone else’s distorted mirror—or even, sometimes, in your own.” —Liesl Schillinger, The New York Times Book Review
“From its opening lines, Messud’s new novel grips like a choke hold. . . .The most unlikely hero, Nora, self-identifies with scornful wit and rage as the titular Woman Upstairs. But oh how Messud, whose last novel was the sharp and brilliant The Emperor’s Children, gives her woman room to roar. . . . Sirena awakens in her an unapologetic lust of life that Nora was previously too good or too scared to claim. The narrative burns toward an inevitable betrayal of startling proportions, one that instead of diminishing Nora lights her ablaze. This is a book sweating with rage, and an exhilarating one. Read it in an openmouthed gulp. After the final powerful paragraphs, in which Nora howls in galvanized fury, throw it down and have a drink, or a dreamless nap. Don’t be surprised if you then pick it back up and start all over again. A” —Karen Valby, Entertainment Weekly
“In the ongoing debate over whether or not women can ‘have it all’ comes a Molotov cocktail thrown by an unlikely provocateur: Claire Messud’s new novel . . . of friendship and betrayal . . . [which] posits that the natural state of womanhood, at least after age 40, is to have nothing, and that satisfaction of any sort can come only via self-deception. . . . ‘I’m not crazy,’ Nora declares at the beginning of the novel. ‘Angry yes, crazy no.’ In Sirena—self-possessed, artistically fulfilled, a mother, foreign, Nora has found the proof that she need not view herself as a woman society has rejected, an archetypal ‘Woman Upstairs with her cats and pots of tea and her goddamn Garnet Hill catalog.’ The Woman Upstairs avoids moral judgment. [It is] simultaneously a justification for extreme acts in the name of friendship, and Nora’s rallying cry for women like her to rage against the world that has been handed to them. . . . Nora is both sympathetic and horrific. She is at once raising a voice to deep-seated misogyny against aging women, and confirming every bias. Messud’s ability to find the frailty, even the artist, in Nora, makes Sirena more complex as well. For all her perfection, Sirena’s rebukes seem, somehow, unconscionably depraved. . . . The novel offers no comfort in the end; it is, at last, the story of a woman for whom reality and a rich fantasy life have merged.” —Daniel D’Addario, New York Observer
“For practical advice about how women can thrive and control their destinies, check out Lean In by Facebook’s ever-gracious COO, Sheryl Sandberg. But maybe after a hard day of believing in yourself, you just want to luxuriate in a fire of cleansing rage. Go ahead: Push the billionaire’s affirmations aside and listen instead to the she-devil in Claire Messud’s ferocious new novel. Lean in—she’ll singe your eyebrows off. [Nora] may [have] rage, but it’s fantastically smart rage—anger that never distorts, even in the upper registers. When Nora complains about women like herself who dutifully tuck themselves away, she ricochets from Charlotte Bronte to Jean Rhys to Henry David Thoreau to Ralph Ellison. Wherever she digs, she hits rich veins of indignation. [Thisis] a tightly wound monologue with the intensity of a novella that reads more like a curse. . . . Anger provides the heat, but the novel’s real energy comes from its intellectual fuel, its all-consuming analytical drive . . . Nora’s self-knowledge keeps the reader off-balance. . . . Even as that psychological drama races toward a dark climax, Nora seduces us with her piercing assessment of the way young women are acculturated, the way older women are trapped. It doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman: It’s hard not to feel your own anxieties and fragile hopes being flayed by these braided strands of confession and blame. Lean in. I dare you.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“Messud knows how to make fiction out of the clash of civilizations. Her heroines . . . inhabit the inky space between continents, physical and generational. Survivors to the core, they cling to the ledge even as their worlds are upended. . . . Messud’s writing shows a growing mastery of mood. Comedy, pathos, sadness: nothing seems beyond her. Her new book has all this—and more. Nora’s dormant rage, which her mother warned would one day awaken, drives her on and on. The Woman Upstairs is not a pretty read, but that is precisely what makes it so hard to put down.” —The Economist
“Terrifyingly perceptive . . . The Emperor’s Children is a quite good novel, [but] The Woman Upstairs does far more with a smaller cast [and] has much greater weight. Messud wants to make a point that even successful people can suffer from a lethal celebrity complex. Nora Eldridge is a kind of Madame Bovary for our time, someone who dreams not of romantic passion but of personal fame, in which the envy of the less fortunate figures importantly. . . . Nora is like Emma Bovary in the conviction that she needs the love of glamorous and important individuals to give her life meaning. . . . One particular triumph of The Woman Upstairs is that Messud’s heroine is so sympathetic, and so eloquent and convincing, that the depth of her illusions is not always apparent. . . . Because Messud has lent Nora her own outstanding gifts as a writer we cannot help believing what she tells us, at least for a while.” —Alison Lurie, The New York Review of Books
“The new novel by the author of The Emperor’s Children is like Gone Girl meets The Bell Jar: A lonely teacher’s fixation on a student’s family slowly drives her insane. Messud’s magic power? Keeping her flawed protagonist relatable to the very end.” —Megan Angelo, Glamour
“In this literary page-turner, a Boston teacher with dreams of becoming an artist is first enamored of, and then feels betrayed by, a seductive couple who’ve relocated from Paris.” —Abbe Wright, O, The Oprah Magazine
“Almost without knowing it, I was hungry for Nora Eldridge, the hero of Messud’s new novel. The title names an archetype: the nice, unmarried lady on the third floor who smiles in the lobby and is quickly forgotten. Nora is a caring schoolteacher seemingly content to look after her ailing father, her dreams of living the life of an artist subsumed by the act of simply living a life. Bitterly funny and self-aware, she claims to be having a ‘Lucy Jordan moment,’ name-checking the Marianne Faithfull song . . . It seems right that Messud’s follow-up to The Emperor’s Children grasps furiously at life and punches back at encroaching age. In The Woman Upstairs, she abandons the polyphonic narration of the previous novel for first-person carpe diem prose that is leaner and meaner. . . . Nora [is] exhilarating, a fiery heroine who arrives to serve [both] middle-aged readers, and the young women who will soon see what it’s like when the spotlight swings away, urging us to make the most of that time between here and the finish line.” —Katrina Onstad, Toronto Life
“Corrosively funny . . . Fifty years ago, Simone de Beauvoir faulted creative women for their unwillingness to ‘dare to irritate, explore, explode.’ Two generations later, anger this combustible still feels refreshing.” —Megan O’Grady, Vogue
“Heartfelt and profound. . . . From the outset, it’s been clear that Claire Messud has all the necessary equipment—a fertile imagination, a grown-up sensibility, and writerly ambition in spades—to write very good fiction, perhaps even a novel that defined our times. Her latest novel is an absolute page-turner, from its grab-you-by-the-collar opening to its final rumination on the creative uses of anger. . . . For another, it may well be the first truly feminist (in the best, least didactic sense) novel I have read in ages—the novel, candid about sex and the intricacies of female desire, that Virginia Woolf hoped someone would write, given a room and income of her own. The Woman Upstairs takes on, at full throttle, the ways in which women are socialized into being accommodating ‘nice girls,’ and the ruthlessness—the ‘myopia’—that is necessary to pursue artistic ambition. It shows Messud at the height of her considerable powers, articulating the quandary of being alive and sentient, covetous and confused in the twenty-first century. . . . The Woman Upstairs is an extraordinary novel, a psychological suspense story of the highest sort that will leave you thinking about its implications for days afterward. Messud’s skills are all on display here, [in] a work of fiction that is not just beautifully observed but also palpably inhabited by its gifted writer in a manner she has not quite dared attempt before.” —Daphne Merkin, Bookforum
“With exhilarating velocity, fury, and wit, the superlative Messud immolates an iconic figure—the good, quiet, self-sacrificing woman—in this acid bath of a novel, while taking on the vicissitudes of family life and the paradoxes of art. Nora [is] our archly funny, venomous, and raging narrator . . . 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.’” —Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
“Claire Messud’s daring, Jamesian new novel takes so many chances and provokes so many questions. . . . Messud is a truth teller about the ruthlessness of art [and] makes a key point about creative work: It means smashing boundaries, using imagination to remake the world. . . . Messud is such a gifted painter of our choices and their consequences. She’s never gone this deep before in showing us how our reality and our pipe dreams intersect. Her portrait of Nora Eldridge, a decent woman who has perhaps crossed the wrong bridges in her life, would move stone. What’s going to become of Nora? What will the Shahids do to her? The Woman Upstairs is Claire Messud’s greatest novel.” —Dennis Haritou, Three Guys One Book
“A self-described ‘good girl’ lifts her mask in Messud’s new novel. ‘How angry am I?’ Nora Eldridge rhetorically asks in her opening sentence. ‘You don’t want to know.’ Nora is furious with herself: for failing to commit to being an artist, for settling for life as a third-grade teacher, 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, 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. . . . Nora’s untrustworthy narration, 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 . . . Brilliant and terrifying.” —Kirkus (starred review)
About the Author
Claire Messud’s most recent novel, The Emperor’s Children, was a New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post Best Book of the Year. Her first novel, When the World Was Steady, and her book of novellas, The Hunters, were both finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award; and her second novel, The Last Life, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and Editor’s Choice at The Village Voice. All four books were named New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Messud has been awarded Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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.
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.
Product details
- Publisher : Knopf; First Edition (April 30, 2013)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 272 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0307596907
- ISBN-13 : 978-0307596901
- Item Weight : 1.13 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.51 x 1.01 x 9.52 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,685,632 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #6,738 in Fiction Urban Life
- #33,956 in Contemporary Women Fiction
- #70,583 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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3.5 out of 5 stars
3.5 out of 5
2,210 global ratings
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Top reviews from the United States
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Reviewed in the United States on January 31, 2014
Reviewed in the United States on May 8, 2013
I'd rate this 3.5 stars.
"We're not the madwomen in the attic--they get lots of play, one way or another. We're the quiet woman at the end of the third-floor hallway, whose trash is always tidy...and who, from behind closed doors, never makes a sound. In our lives of quiet desperation, the woman upstairs is who we are...and not a soul registers that we are furious. We're completely invisible."
So says Nora Eldridge, an elementary school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who always dreamed she'd make something special of her life. She had aspirations of being a successful, worldly artist, along with being a wife and mother. Yet instead she's found herself as "the woman upstairs," the person always providing support, encouragement, and praise to those who do achieve, those who live more glamorous lives than she does. But although she has accepted this role, she yearns for something more, she yearns to break out of her dull, perfectly pleasant life.
When the glamorous, cultured Shahid family comes into her life, they begin awakening feelings in Nora she had long since tamped down. She is enchanted by one of her students, young Reza Shahid, who quickly becomes her favorite student as a result of his intelligence, sensitivity, and affection for her. And while she initially finds Reza's father, Skandar, a Lebanese professor working on a fellowship for a year at Harvard, intriguing, it is Reza's mother--the sensually alluring artist Sirena--who utterly dazzles Nora.
Nora finds herself opening like a flower under the light of Sirena's friendship, particularly when the two decide to share studio space. The proximity to Sirena's creativity inspires Nora's own artistic talent to flourish, although she is often simply content to spend time with Sirena without actually doing any work. And as their friendship grows, Sirena's companionship--and her increasing reliance on Nora in many ways--makes Nora finally feel wanted, feel as if she has a purpose. Yet she realizes that the Shahids still view her as a companion and confidante, and they will be able to continue their lives when they return to Paris, and the thought of again being alone frightens and angers Nora.
As her dependence and infatuation with all three of the Shahids grows, so does her frustration with her own life, yet she only can see them as her source of happiness and purpose. She is in love with being needed, with feeling alive, and doesn't want that feeling to end. And as the deadline for the Shahids to leave Massachusetts draws closer, Nora struggles with dramatically fluctuating emotions, and her actions become more impulsive.
We've seen this character so many times before, the woman who felt she was doomed to a boring and uneventful life suddenly being awakened by those around her, and her steadfast need to cling to these feelings rather than face a return to her old life. At times I found her an intriguing character, and at times, her neediness and resentment wearied me. Having seen this type of situation in other books, I wondered if Messud would choose the predictable path for her plot, or cause Nora to become utterly unhinged. I was pleased that the book didn't take all of the twists I expected (and feared), and in fact, Messud threw in a twist at the end that surprised me and left me thinking much as it did Nora.
It's difficult to sustain interest in a story about a vengeful and needy person (except when it's a fantasy) unless the author has the ability to make you feel for the character. While I didn't love this book, I did like it quite a bit. I felt that, for the most part, Messud gave Nora enough layers to keep her interesting (if not wholly sympathetic), and I wondered just where the plot would go. It's an age-old story with not a completely age-old ending.
"We're not the madwomen in the attic--they get lots of play, one way or another. We're the quiet woman at the end of the third-floor hallway, whose trash is always tidy...and who, from behind closed doors, never makes a sound. In our lives of quiet desperation, the woman upstairs is who we are...and not a soul registers that we are furious. We're completely invisible."
So says Nora Eldridge, an elementary school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who always dreamed she'd make something special of her life. She had aspirations of being a successful, worldly artist, along with being a wife and mother. Yet instead she's found herself as "the woman upstairs," the person always providing support, encouragement, and praise to those who do achieve, those who live more glamorous lives than she does. But although she has accepted this role, she yearns for something more, she yearns to break out of her dull, perfectly pleasant life.
When the glamorous, cultured Shahid family comes into her life, they begin awakening feelings in Nora she had long since tamped down. She is enchanted by one of her students, young Reza Shahid, who quickly becomes her favorite student as a result of his intelligence, sensitivity, and affection for her. And while she initially finds Reza's father, Skandar, a Lebanese professor working on a fellowship for a year at Harvard, intriguing, it is Reza's mother--the sensually alluring artist Sirena--who utterly dazzles Nora.
Nora finds herself opening like a flower under the light of Sirena's friendship, particularly when the two decide to share studio space. The proximity to Sirena's creativity inspires Nora's own artistic talent to flourish, although she is often simply content to spend time with Sirena without actually doing any work. And as their friendship grows, Sirena's companionship--and her increasing reliance on Nora in many ways--makes Nora finally feel wanted, feel as if she has a purpose. Yet she realizes that the Shahids still view her as a companion and confidante, and they will be able to continue their lives when they return to Paris, and the thought of again being alone frightens and angers Nora.
As her dependence and infatuation with all three of the Shahids grows, so does her frustration with her own life, yet she only can see them as her source of happiness and purpose. She is in love with being needed, with feeling alive, and doesn't want that feeling to end. And as the deadline for the Shahids to leave Massachusetts draws closer, Nora struggles with dramatically fluctuating emotions, and her actions become more impulsive.
We've seen this character so many times before, the woman who felt she was doomed to a boring and uneventful life suddenly being awakened by those around her, and her steadfast need to cling to these feelings rather than face a return to her old life. At times I found her an intriguing character, and at times, her neediness and resentment wearied me. Having seen this type of situation in other books, I wondered if Messud would choose the predictable path for her plot, or cause Nora to become utterly unhinged. I was pleased that the book didn't take all of the twists I expected (and feared), and in fact, Messud threw in a twist at the end that surprised me and left me thinking much as it did Nora.
It's difficult to sustain interest in a story about a vengeful and needy person (except when it's a fantasy) unless the author has the ability to make you feel for the character. While I didn't love this book, I did like it quite a bit. I felt that, for the most part, Messud gave Nora enough layers to keep her interesting (if not wholly sympathetic), and I wondered just where the plot would go. It's an age-old story with not a completely age-old ending.
Top reviews from other countries
Malini Gazdar
5.0 out of 5 stars
Don’t be too trusting of new friends.
Reviewed in India on March 21, 2021
An unusual story. The main character was believable and one felt sympathy for her plight. From the outside, it’s easy to see how she let herself be taken in, but one wonders if there was any way she could have avoided it.
Larrere
4.0 out of 5 stars
Une fine étude psychologique de la crise de la quarantaine
Reviewed in France on September 30, 2014
The Woman Upstairs est une fine étude psychologique de la crise de la quarantaine chez une jeune femme célibataire américaine, Nora, institutrice dans une école élémentaire de Boston. Par un de ses élèves, Reza, elle rencontre ses parents, un brillant universitaire d'origine libanaise vivant en France et professeur invité à Boston, et sa femme, italienne, artiste. Elle s'attache à la famille, dont elle tombe globalement amoureuse, et va partager avec Sirena un atelier où celle-ci prépare une "installation" tandis que Nora fabrique des représentations en miniature mettant en scène des femmes romancières ou poetes. Dans la relation très étroite qu'elle entretient avec chaque membre de la famille, Nora s'épanouit et croit pouvoir réaliser ses ambitions artistiques. Mais la relation va se révéler profondément décevante : ses amis partis, Nora revient à son train train et va découvrir qu'elle a été utilisée par des gens qui ne se souciaient guère d'elle. Elle reste "la femme du dessus", bien gentille, qui passe toujours après les autres.
Cette description de la découverte d'une vie ratée est assez poignante, et l'on se pose, comme la narratrice, à travers les yeux et le récit de laquelle tout est dit, la question de savoir ce qu'elle a bien pu signifier pour ces gens qui l'ont si vite oubliée. Le personnage de Nora fait penser à la Lily Bart de House of Mirth d'Edith Wharton : faute d'avoir une vie propre, elle ne peut que parasiter celle des autres et être instrumentée par eux.
Il y a de quoi faire discuter dans les clubs de lecture. C'est le livre rêvé pour cela.
Cette description de la découverte d'une vie ratée est assez poignante, et l'on se pose, comme la narratrice, à travers les yeux et le récit de laquelle tout est dit, la question de savoir ce qu'elle a bien pu signifier pour ces gens qui l'ont si vite oubliée. Le personnage de Nora fait penser à la Lily Bart de House of Mirth d'Edith Wharton : faute d'avoir une vie propre, elle ne peut que parasiter celle des autres et être instrumentée par eux.
Il y a de quoi faire discuter dans les clubs de lecture. C'est le livre rêvé pour cela.
donata
2.0 out of 5 stars
scialbo e prolisso
Reviewed in Italy on November 30, 2013
Prolisso, noioso, personaggi mal descritti, antipatici, senza anima. Una protagonista di neanche 40 anni che si ritiene (oggi!!) vecchia e con un piede nella fossa. Una famigliola che dovrebbe nascondere chissà quali oscuri segreti, ed è solo prevedibile e approfitta (giustamente, verrebbe da dire a un certo punto del racconto!) dell l'ingenuità della protagonista. Che fra l'altro non abita neanche al piano di sopra, e quindi che c'entra il titolo?
annabel
5.0 out of 5 stars
Clever, intellegent and worthwhile
Reviewed in Germany on June 26, 2013
The plot, as such as there is one, is not new, nor is the story telling but the writing is superb. It allows you to feel fully in tune with the character, feel her emotional journey and literally will her to change her life. Typical of the Woman Upstairs she appears real and the inner emotional world separate from the appearance world. Many of the critics are spot on but it does not detract from a great read. Everything a book should be. Highly recommended.
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Virginia Holmes
3.0 out of 5 stars
An angry woman
Reviewed in Australia on May 19, 2014
This book held my attention, and was quite easy to read. It describes the life of a young American woman who is strangely dissociated from events around her until the arrival of a new parent at the school at which she teaches. She becomes heavily involved in the life of this woman and her husband. But it turns out ultimately that the pair have taken her for granted and exploited her, resulting in intense disappointment and bitterness. This is a very angry book. It is feminist in orientation, but counterbalanced by the fact that the exploiter of the main protagonist is also a woman. I don't think this book holds great general appeal, particularly not to men. Nevertheless, as an older woman, I did enjoy a lot of it. It is well written.
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