Review by New York Times Review
Claire Messud's latest novel, "The Woman Upstairs," is an incongruous mashup of a very self-consciously literary novel (invoking the likes of Chekhov) and one of those psychological horror films like "Single White Female" or "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle," in which someone, ominously, is not who she appears to be. Ms. Messud's dazzling 1999 novel, "The Last Life," showcased her abundant literary gifts: her understanding of the complexities of familial algebra and the intersection of public and private history. Though less organic and emotionally satisfying, her 2006 novel, "The Emperor's Children," attested to her ability to write a best seller that moved back and forth between the comic and the tragic, the satirical and the intimately personal. "The Woman Upstairs" boasts an even splashier, attention-grabbing plot, but it never makes a leap into narrative hyperspace. The reader can never quite shrug off the sense that the novel is a sort of laboratory experiment that hasn't entirely gelled, an experiment in which an author who writes with Jamesian attention to emotional nuance has tried to inject a tabloidy story line with literary import. Whereas the tale of a family's dissolution in "The Last Life" possessed all the visceral complexities and unexpected developments of real life, the story in "The Woman Upstairs" has a schematic quality, as if points on an outline were being methodically ticked off and fleshed out. And while Ms. Messud does an intricate job of mapping her heroine's inner life, the literary references can sometimes feel horribly heavy-handed: it's hard to forget that the whiny narrator is a woman named Nora, who just happens to build little dioramas that look like dollhouses. It's as if these allusions had been lacquered onto the story to compensate for its more sensationalistic and contrived plot twists involving sex, lies and videotape. Nora, as we quickly learn, is one very angry woman, who, like her namesake in Ibsen's "Doll's House," is in search of an identity for herself. She's a third-grade teacher who has spent her life being the good girl, the A student, the devoted daughter, the responsible "woman upstairs" - not the madwoman in the attic, she insists. She's the kind of woman who might be a close relative of Ellison's Invisible Man or Dostoyevsky's Underground Man. Her mother's nickname for her was Mouse. Nora's mother, who felt suffocated in her suburban marriage, exhorted Nora to go out in the world, get a job and not become dependent on a man: " "Don't ever get yourself stuck like this,' she hissed." Becoming a teacher was a practical choice, but Nora has dreamed of another life - a life as an artist, as an urban sophisticate, at home in places like Paris and Rome and Madrid, not teaching elementary school in Cambridge, Mass. She won plaudits in high school for coming up with an inventive solution to an art assignment and since then has secretly cherished wild ambitions. Her current project consists of little dollhouselike constructions, depicting rooms inhabited by Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Alice Neel and Edie Sedgwick. It's hard for the reader to tell how trustworthy a narrator Nora is, and things get considerably messier after she meets the Shahid family. The Shahids have moved to Cambridge from Paris for a year, and their son, Reza, is one of Nora's newest students. Nora promptly falls in love with every member of the family. She thinks of Reza as the ideal child and fantasizes that he is her son. She comes to think of his mother, Sirena - who is an up-and-coming conceptual artist in Europe - as her idealized self, the artist she might have been if she hadn't ended up taking care of her ailing mother. And she comes to think of Sirena's husband, Skandar, a visiting professor at Harvard, as her ideal man, and dreams of having sex with him. In a direct reference to Chekhov's story "The Black Monk," Nora describes the Shahids as her "three Black Monks" who for a brief period reawaken her to the possibilities of life. At 37, just when she thinks her life has prematurely closed, she feels as if a door were opening. Nora's relationship with the Shahids, which quickly begins to take on an obsessive coloration, is vaguely reminiscent of the one developed by the narrator of Ms. Messud's novella "The Hunters" toward a downstairs neighbor. Nora becomes manic and flushed with excitement whenever she is around one of the Shahids, and takes any missed meeting or call as a slight or cause for worry. She begins sharing an art studio with Sirena, who inspires her to get back to work on her own projects. She starts baby-sitting for Reza in the evening, and later allows Skandar to take her on long, meandering walks home in which they talk about politics and philosophy and ethics. Soon she covets not only Sirena's life - including her husband and her child - but her imagination as well. In response to Nora's infatuation with the Shahid family, her best friend, Didi, gently suggests that she's "making up stories" in her head, and Ms. Messud uses the question of Nora's unreliability as a narrator to address many of the same themes she's explored in her earlier work - namely, the subjectivity of the narratives people tell themselves about their lives, the ways they project their own wishes and fears onto others. We are reminded of how people create mythologies around themselves to explain (or rationalize) why things worked out the way they did, and of how identity is shaped not just by one's own impulses and dreams, but also by the expectations (whether spurned or embraced) of others. To what degree is Nora imposing her own fantasies on her account of her interactions with the Shahid family? Is the story we're reading a vague approximation of reality or a thoroughly warped vision filtered through the prism of Nora's unstable psyche? In getting Nora to help out on her big new project - a pretentious-sounding installation based on "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" that will make her an art world star - is Sirena using her worshipful friend and stealing her away from her own work? Or has the pushy and envious Nora insinuated herself into Sirena's project in the hope of enjoying some reflected glory? Are Sirena and Skandar going through a rough patch in their marriage that could make Skandar genuinely tempted to have an affair with Nora? Or is the couple in cahoots, playing out some more dangerous mental game with Nora? For that matter, are all such scenarios mere figments of Nora's overheated imagination? Such questions, like the novel's copious literary allusions, lend Nora's story a depth lacking in your everyday psychological thriller. But the dense, self-reflexive writing and the willfully commercial plot combine here to create what is, in the end, an intriguing but ungainly Frankenstein monster of a novel.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 2, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In this acid bath of a novel, the superlative Messud (The Emperor's Children, 2006) immolates an iconic figure the good, quiet, self-sacrificing woman with exhilarating velocity, fury, and wit while taking on the vicissitudes of family life and the paradoxes of art. Nora, our archly funny, venomous, and raging 42-year-old narrator, recounts her thirty-seventh year, when she was living alone and teaching third grade in Boston after the death of her profoundly frustrated mother. Nora longs to make art but hasn't mustered the necessary conviction. Enter the Paris-based Shahids. Reza, her new student, is a magnet for bullies stirred up by post-9/11 xenophobia. His Palestinian Lebanese father, Skandar, is a prominent academic spending a year at Harvard. His Italian mother, Sirena, is an artist in need of a studio and a studio mate. She promptly recruits Nora. A confident and passionate conduit for mythological powers, Sirena creates lush gardens and jungles made out of household items and refuse. Unworldly and lonely Nora, a veritable daughter of Ibsen, builds dollhouses small, painstakingly accurate replicas of the rooms occupied by women artists ranging from Emily Dickinson to Edie Sedgwick. Messud's scorching social anatomy, red-hot psychology, galvanizing story, and incandescent language make for an all-circuits-firing novel about enthrallment, ambition, envy, and betrayal. A tour de force portraying a no longer invisible or silent woman upstairs. --Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
It's not that elementary school teacher Nora Eldridge's life has gone particularly wrong, it's that it hasn't gone particularly right. She sold out her artistic dreams for success and stability, and become angry and full of self-loathing somewhere along the way. But when a young student, Reza Shahid, and his family enter her life, Nora finds herself changing as she is drawn into the Shahids' world. Cassadra Campbell's narration is pitch-perfect. She shifts back and forth between the different characters, lending all of them unique voices that capture their complexity. Her first-person narration is a delightful blend of restraint and emotion that will keeps listeners slightly anxious at all the right moments. By striking this balance, she captures the hard edge of Nora-and of the text-in a way that will resonate with listeners. A Knopf hardcover. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Messud (The Emperor's Children) returns with another intimate and piercing novel. Nora Eldridge, an elementary schoolteacher, once dreamed of being an artist but put aside her own dreams and ambitions to care for others. Her life takes an unexpected turn when the cosmopolitan Shahid family moves in from Paris. Nora is fiercely drawn to their son, a student in her class; his mother, an accomplished artist; and his dashing father, about whom she can't help fantasizing. Nora tries to get as involved in their lives as she can, until she ultimately realizes the cost of living vicariously through others. Cassandra Campbell does a beautiful job of narrating Nora's inner struggles. The listener easily gets lost in the beauty of her voice and the conviction of her efforts. VERDICT Highly recommended for fans of literary fiction and taut drama. ["This quietly, tensely unfolding story is related in retrospect, so we know from the start that it has ended badly for Nora. The only question is how. Remarkably, Messud...lets us experience Nora's betrayal as if it were our own, and what finally happens really is a punch in the stomach," read the review of the Knopf hc, LJ Xpress Reviews, 4/26/13.-Ed.]-Erin Cataldi, Franklin Coll., IN (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A self-described "good girl" lifts her mask in Messud's scarifying new novel (The Emperor's Children, 2006, etc.). "How angry am I?" Nora Eldridge rhetorically asks in her opening sentence. "You don't want to know." But she tells us anyway. Nora is furious with her dead mother, her elderly father and her estranged brother, none of whom seem to have done anything very terrible. Basically, Nora is furious with herself: for failing to commit to being an artist, for settling for life as a third-grade teacher in Cambridge, Mass., for lacking the guts even to be openly enraged. Instead, she is the woman upstairs, "whose trash is always tidy, who smiles brightly in the stairwell." So when the exotic Shahid family enters her life in the fall of 2004, Nora sees them as saviors. Reza is in her class; after another student attacks and calls the half-Lebanese boy "a terrorist," she meets his Italian mother, Sirena, the kind of bold, assertive artist Nora longs to be. They wind up sharing a studio, and Nora eventually neglects her own work to help Sirena with a vast installation called Wonderland. She's also drawn to Skandar, an academic whose one-year fellowship has brought his family to Cambridge from Paris. "So you're in love with Sirena, and you want to fuck her husband and steal her child," comments Nora's friend Didi after she confesses her intense feelings. It's nowhere near that simple, as the story unfolds to reveal Sirena as something of a user--and perhaps Skandar too, though it's unwise to credit Nora's jaundiced perceptions. Her untrustworthy, embittered narration, deliberately set up as a feminine counterpoint to the rantings of Dostoevsky's Underground Man, is an astonishing feat of creative imagination: at once self-lacerating and self-pitying, containing enough truth to induce squirms. Messud persuasively plunges us into the tortured psyche of a conflicted soul whose defiant closing assertion inspires little confidence that Nora can actually change her ways. Brilliant and terrifying.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
