Excerpt: The Woman Upstairs
April 19, 2013 1:51 PM ET
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. Copyright 2013 by Claire Messud. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
This review is from: The Woman Upstairs (Hardcover)
Most of the reviews of the book are overly harsh or overly praising. It's a pretty good book, and as some have complained, with sections that are a little drawn out and repetitive.
The criticism I think that is without merit is that the character isn't likable. The character is an accurate human portrait and if any of us were laid to bare the way this character honestly expresses her feelings and thoughts, I think we too would be less than likable.
Years ago I heard this woman explain an entire attitude of certain women as the ``smugly married." It's easy to look down your nose at her if you have all the adornments of female success, the most important of which is that someone has found you sexually desirable enough to marry you. And once you have children, the deal is sealed. You are woman, hear you roar!
But if you got overly fussy, maybe thought something better was coming, or there was a split or almost no suitors and the shadows grow long on the dock, you do sense that you will probably never marry and most certainly now, never have children. This is of course the reality for Nora, the now spinster school teacher, whose mother who loved her is dead and whose aging father needs her. Nora is the utility person. Life's bat boy. The filler of water bottles and cleaner of equipment but never gets to play the game. The center of no one's life but the agent of many lives. A person of talent unexpressed and un-honed which time will turn to mediocrity because it was simply never developed. A person so inconsequential that those she thinks are closest to her will humiliate her if it serves their own ends. And she's angry because now she knows all this with certainty.
Naturally, she has lied to herself about this truth. It's called coping. And this is where the writer I think advances beyond a lot of readers. We all lie to ourselves about some critical truth in our lives. Unless you have caught yourself in some lie on which your identity stands, and then have had some unexpected circumstance bring you right up against that lie so powerfully that it can literally knock you to your knees, you may simply lack the experience to fully appreciate this book. A lot of people don't like the book I think because most of us just keep whistling right to the grave.
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Claire Messud's cosmopolitan sensibilities infuse her fiction with a refreshing cultural fluidity. Her first novel, When the World Was Steady (1995), followed two midlife sisters in search of new beginnings, one in Bali and the other on the Isle of Skye. In her second novel, The Last Life (1999), a teenager reacting to a family crisis pondered her father's origins in Algeria and southern France, and her mother's New England roots. The Emperor's Children (2006) captured the ambiance among a group of Manhattan's privileged set in the months leading up to and right after the Sept. 11 attacks. Her fourth novel is a departure of sorts, focusing on the point of view of a relative outsider bedazzled by a worldly couple visiting Harvard.
The Woman Upstairs opens with extraordinary heat and momentum. "How angry am I? You don't want to know," rages Nora Eldridge, a single third-grade teacher in Cambridge, Mass. whose mother gave her the nickname "Mouse." Nora's rant invokes Dostoyevsky's Underground Man and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. But the terrain she describes is not subterranean: "We're always upstairs. We're the quiet woman at the end of the third-floor hallway. who smiles brightly in the stairwell with a cheerful greeting. and not a soul registers that we are furious."
What has led Nora to this state? Her life-changing moments begin at age 37, according to her slippery, bitter, often self-deprecating account. She sees her horizons narrow: "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."
Her mother has died after struggling for years with ALS (aka Lou Gehrig's disease). Two years later, in September 2004, the Paris-based Shahid family moves to Cambridge and reignites her long-ignored hunger for love and art.
Reza Shahid, 8, enrolls in Nora's class. During the first month of school, he is attacked by three bullies who call him a "terrorist." In the aftermath, Nora meets his mother, Sirena, an artist born in Milan who specializes in installations of "lush gardens and jungles made out of household items and refuse," based on fairy tales and myths — Avalon, Oz, Elsinore. Her husband, Skandar, is a Beirut-born professor at France's top-tier Ecole Normale Superieure. Nora's intense friendship with the Shahids lasts less than a year — the length of Skandar's fellowship at Harvard, where he is working on a book about ethics and history.
Claire Messud is an American author. Her 2006 novel The Emperor's Children was longlisted for the Man Booker prize. Lisa Cohen/Knopf hide caption
Claire Messud is an American author. Her 2006 novel The Emperor's Children was longlisted for the Man Booker prize.
Lisa Cohen/Knopf
Sirena invites Nora to share a Somerville studio. In Wonderland, her new project, Sirena is combining Lewis Carroll's Alice with the vision of the 12th-century Muslim philosopher Ibn Tufail, who wrote a novel about a boy "growing up alone on a desert island, discovering everything — including himself and God." Inspired by Sirena, Nora works on a series of Joseph Cornell-scaled dioramas, beginning with a miniature replica of Emily Dickinson in her bedroom. She envisions similar boxes with Virginia Woolf writing her suicide note at Rodmell, Alice Neel in her sanatorium room after a nervous breakdown, and Edie Sedgwick in her room in Andy Warhol's Factory. Meanwhile, Skandar gives her what amounts to a private tutorial in Middle Eastern history. (When he is upset about the assassination of Prime Minister Rafic Hariri in Beirut, Nora Googles "Lebanon war.")
The Woman Upstairs brims with energy and ideas. In what Nora refers to as a "manic unfolding," she experiences "a sort of awakening, a type of excitement about the wider world." As her infatuation with the Shahids grows, she seems disturbingly off-balance, aware she is making more of the relationship than they. "Both with Sirena and Skandar, I veered between fantasies of intimacy and of bleak rejection," she muses.
The book also functions in part as a suspenseful psychological thriller, propelled by the question of what has so enraged Nora. When the answer comes, the revelation doesn't quite match the furious buildup. But the core of The Woman Upstairs — Messud's intimate portrait of two women artists, Nora, the inhibited American "woman upstairs," constrained by reality and working in miniature, and Sirena, the European "Purveyor of Dreams," capable of drawing upon East and West, Then and Now, Imaginary and Real — is brilliant. Messud's description of Wonderland as it grows from everyday items — aspirin, soap, shards of mirror — into a magical universe filled with monstrosity and wonder, lingers, as does her Nora, an artist who learns that a good definition of any artist in the world is " a ruthless person " — and that her fury may be no substitute for ruthlessness.
Read an excerpt of The Woman Upstairs
The Woman Upstairs
Nora Eldridge, a 37-year-old elementary school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is on the verge of disappearing. Having abandoned her desire to be an artist, she has become the "woman upstairs," a reliable friend and tidy neighbour always on the fringe of others' achievements. Then into her classroom walks a new pupil, Reza Shahid, a child who enchants as if from a fai Nora Eldridge, a 37-year-old elementary school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is on the verge of disappearing. Having abandoned her desire to be an artist, she has become the "woman upstairs," a reliable friend and tidy neighbour always on the fringe of others' achievements. Then into her classroom walks a new pupil, Reza Shahid, a child who enchants as if from a fairy tale. He and his parents--dashing Skandar, a half-Muslim Professor of Ethical History born in Beirut, and Sirena, an effortlessly glamorous Italian artist--have come to America for Skandar to teach at Harvard.
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The Woman Upstairs is an occasion to reawaken a literary hot button that I love: the unlikeable character. Plenty of people hated The Emperor’s Children for the same reason they hated The Corrections . couldn’t relate to/sympathize with the characters, wouldn’t want to be friends with them, etc. In a recent Publishers Weekly interview, Messud was asked about Nora, her dutiful but rage-filled, 40-something schoolteacher/wannabe artist whose life is reawakened but then betrayed by a charismatic exp The Woman Upstairs is an occasion to reawaken a literary hot button that I love: the unlikeable character. Plenty of people hated The Emperor’s Children for the same reason they hated The Corrections . couldn’t relate to/sympathize with the characters, wouldn’t want to be friends with them, etc. In a recent Publishers Weekly interview, Messud was asked about Nora, her dutiful but rage-filled, 40-something schoolteacher/wannabe artist whose life is reawakened but then betrayed by a charismatic expat and (successful) artist, her charming 8 year old son, and her scholarly husband: “I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you? Her outlook is almost unbearably grim.” To which Messud replies:
“What kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? ….Hamlet. Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov. If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t 'is this a potential friend for me?' but 'is this character alive?'"
This resonates in a big way with me. Isn't that why we read, to have complete access to a character’s deepest thoughts and feelings in all their messiness, whether via the first person or third? The kind of access we don't get to even our closest friends and relatives in real life? But a very smart Goodreads review of this novel also notes: “I read to find friends, and shame on any fiction writer who tries to embarrass me for that. I can't recall a single thrilling reading experience in my life that wasn't about connecting to the characters.”
Which to me just solidifies the act of reading as one of the most creatively subjective pursuits there is; you can’t say a person isn't a discerning reader for having an honest reaction to a story's unlikeable characters. But at the same time I don’t like to think that The Woman Upstairs could be dismissed on this issue alone.
So what of the novel? It’s not for everyone. Is Nora unlikeable? Sure. She’s also angry, and lonely, and carries the burden of her family’s past along with her. But she’s not a character without very real humanity. Her furious, all-too-apparent self-consciousness--the way she sometimes bathes, almost luxuriously, in her anger--may be unrelatable and perhaps even repulsive, but it’s impossible not to be moved by her desire to ultimately transcend that anger in her quest to live an authentic life. To her, each member of the Shahid family, “in my impassioned interior conversations, granted me some aspect of my most dearly held, most fiercely hidden, heart’s desires: life, art, motherhood, love and the great seductive promise that I wasn’t nothing . that I could be seen for my unvarnished self and that this hidden self, this precious girl without a mask, unseen for decades, could--that she must, indeed--leave a trace upon the world.”
While it may not sway some readers, for me this makes Nora's likeability completely irrelevant. I can’t read lines like this and not be moved. . more
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