I have wanted to read this book ever since Claire Messud attended the Sydney Writers' Festival last year and impressed attendees with her obvious intelligence. I must admit, though, that I had very little idea what it was about until I actually picked it up to read. I did not know, for example, that the "woman upstairs" of the title refers to middle-aged women who have failed to partner up and surround themselves with children, in the way that society expects them to, and who therefore feel relegated to the "attic" of the world (they are not madwomen, Messud's protagonist is at pains to point out, with clear reference to Bertha Mason; but expectations hang heavy upon them for how they are meant to live, quietly, without causing trouble for anyone else). Please note that this notion of modern late-30s female singledom as a "failure" is Messud's (or rather, her protagonist's), and not mine. So we get immediately to the crux of my issue with this book: the attitude of its protagonist towards age and ageing.
First, though, I must stress how much I really enjoyed most of the novel. Messud is an absorbing writer, and Nora Eldridge is superbly drawn in her self-absorbed, intense rage against the world. Her fury courses through the book, instilling each page with shimmering vibrancy. I understand this fire is missing from Messud's other books, and the extreme emotion here certainly makes for compelling reading.
Nora is a third grade teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is highly regarded and well-liked. She has few close friends, but those she does have are good friends indeed. She looks after her widowed father and her spinsterly aunt, the woman she fears she is becoming.
However well she hides it, though, Nora is angry, seethingly so. She is 42 at the time of writing and 37 when the events she describes unfolded, and during this, her "middle-age", she feels her life is over. She is furious with the way she believes she is regarded by society, and by what she sees as being her lot in life. She wanted so much more. "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.".
Nora was born to a mother whose great dilemma had been "to glimpse freedom too late, at too high a price." By the time her mother saw that a career and independence were possible, she was tied down to a domestic life with children. And this, she cautioned, is what Nora must avoid at all costs. Which she has, so much so that Nora now has the opposite problem. She has never married, and has no children. She lives in a world that is increasingly about appearances, where she and other women her age are considered to be "invisible". She still makes her art, tiny replicas of other women's rooms, a series she intends to call "A Room of One's Own?", the question mark being key. But her art, too, is small and private and, in not being seen, this side of her, the artist's side, is also invisible.
When Nora meets the Shahids, a family from France whose worldliness and beauty and interest seem to rub off on her, she feels that something is finally happening. The world turns, once again. All of a sudden, where before there had been no possibilities, now anything is possible. Nora falls in love, with Sirena, the glamorous Parisian artist, with Skandar, her handsome Lebanese-Palestinian professor husband, and with Reza, their sweet, long-lashed dark-haired son. It is an obsessive love, a love that is troubling to read. We can see, even as Nora feels she is awakening in their midst, that she means so much less to them than they to her. But where this will take Nora is unknown until the powerful ending of this book.
I was absorbed in Nora's interior rant, in her obsessions. But I was torn because, whilst I understand that one's late 30s / early 40s can be a difficult time for a woman - that transition from desirable youth to something less obviously glamourous and yet unknown - I also feel (like many other reviewers), that Nora's self-perception is largely self-pitying rubbish. Another way, for example, of expressing the notion of "middle-aged" is "in one's prime". The middle of one's life is also likely to be the most productive time of one's life. No longer so caught up in finding oneself, one can hopefully start to enjoy life more deeply.
I think it is true that society is geared, in many ways, towards admiration of youth in women, rather than age. And I know that it is difficult to be childless, not by choice, but by circumstance, at a time when most women one's own age are subsumed in the time consuming endeavours of raising a family. I myself met my husband late and started having children in my mid-30s. But because I was single in my early 30s I also know for a fact that Nora, especially in Cambridge, Massachusetts (she is not living in rural Idaho, for heaven's sakes), could be living a seriously exciting life at 37. She could be saving up her teacher's salary to travel during her long vacations. She could be studying. She could surround herself with other single 30-somethings, she could be dating and eating out at fabulous restaurants and going to art galleries and meeting new people and filling her life with the stuff that us "smug marrieds" only have time to dream about.
Anyway. The frustration is misplaced because we are dealing, here, with a character who has persuaded herself that she will live in a shoebox for the rest of her life. Until this family come along, who interrupt that certainty. And then, when they leave, which we, as readers, know all along they are going to do (this is really not a spoiler) they destroy her. Because it becomes abundantly clear that she only ever meant very little to them. She was a placeholder in Sirena's life, but for Nora, Sirena had become the centre of her life.
Messud tells a dark psychological tale and I was left horrified, hoping that Nora's rage would indeed fuel her into some sort of extreme life-affirming action.
Overall assessment: 4 out of 5.
Pros: Terrific language, Messud fully engages the reader with this dark and disturbing tale which is, at times, un-put-downable. As well as a story about the energy and power of anger and obsession, this is a novel of ideas - there are fascinating discussions about what it means to be an artist, what defines art, about history and who writes it and about ethics and morality.
Cons: It is unsettling to get inside the head of someone whose views are so frustratingly self-destructive. And Nora's continous description of women of a certain age as "spinsterly" is unnerving for those of us reading who are in her age group! I mean - "death is knocking"? For heaven's sakes!! I hope I have another 40 years left in me! Life ain't over yet, sweetheart!
Select quotes:
"Sirena was turning, before my eyes, into my ideal of an artist - as if I'd imagined her and, by imagining her, had conjured her into being. And here's the weird thing: her existence as an ideal woman artist didn't feel as though it thwarted or controlled me, I didn't look at her and think, 'Why are you almost famous and I'm only your helper?' I don't recall having the thought even once. Instead, I looked at her and saw myself, saw what suddenly seemed possible for me, too, because it was possible for her."
"But to be furious, murderously furious, is to be alive."
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