The Woman Upstairs
a novel by Claire Messud
Alfred A. Knopf, 2013
253 pages
We are blessed to have an exceptional public library in our midst, which constantly brings in the latest offerings in fiction and non-fiction. Sometimes it is fun to wander in, go to the ‘New Books’ section and pull one off the shelf, not knowing what lies inside the covers. I recently did just that, coming home with The Woman Upstairs, by Claire Messud. Messud is a contemporary American author, who received widespread praise for her previous novel, “The Emperor’s Children.” At first, I was not sure I wanted to hang in there with the main character of this work, written in a first person memoir style. She seemed too self-absorbed, too edgy, angry, more than a wee bit neurotic, and some of her endless sentences read like unedited thoughts caused by too much caffeine.
But when Nora Eldridge’s life becomes entangled with that of the exotic Rashid family, the book takes hold. Her continuous examination of her own existence as it adapts to these glamorous new friends (husband, wife, and young son) articulates so much of what is universally troubling and confusing about modern life: the roles that women, in particular, must play; the perplexing question about what is real versus what is imagined; and the impossibility of knowing for sure. Nora’s struggle to honor her commitment to her own art is juxtaposed against Sirena Rashid’s secure position in the established art world. Her love for Sirena, Sirena’s husband, Skandor, and their son, Reza, passes through stages of obsession and frustration, and is finally put to an impossible challenge near the book’s end.
Claire Messud is at her best when writing descriptively of places and people, as in her vivid depiction of a Muslim wedding, or her many portraits of her beloved Reza. She wanders freely across the borders of the real and unreal, and most of the high drama in the narrative occurs in the labyrinth landscape of her mind. She makes us her confidants, close observers of the same things she is seeing and feeling, addressing the reader directly often throughout the book. Messud uses the term ‘the woman upstairs’ as a metaphor for how others see Nora Eldridge: a reliable, unobtrusive, self-sufficient, organized woman—almost a cipher. Nora’s struggle throughout her story comes from the enormous disparity between this placid exterior and the turmoil raging inside her. By the book’s end we have become caught up in this turmoil and feel real fear when a shocking discovery causes it to boil over. When she warns, “My anger is prodigious…Just watch me,” it is hard to resist reaching for the telephone to dial 911!
Recommended for adult readers