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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.
This ebook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.
- Sales Rank: #159732 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-04-30
- Released on: 2013-04-30
- Format: Kindle eBook
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
Most helpful customer reviews
289 of 306 people found the following review helpful.
Whistling to Our Graves
By Tanya Willow
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.
309 of 344 people found the following review helpful.
Stunning, smart, savvy. Left me gasping!
By B. Case
"The Woman Upstairs," by Claire Messud, is a first rate psychological thriller that will keep readers spellbound, in the style of a classic Hitchcock film, right up until the final pages, where a stunning twist illuminates and clarifies the whole. This is a very smart, savvy novel--one that provides sustained story telling, literary, and intellectually pleasure. In fact, it is one of the best books I've reviewed all year.
The plot and characters are brilliantly constructed, the whole fully believable to the smallest psychological detail. Massud is a master storyteller and a fastidious psychological stylist. She's also an exquisite writer. Reading this book is like taking a temporary journey inside the mind of the main character, Nora Eldridge. Readers will emerge gasping at the end, fully comprehending the character they've inhabited and the trajectory of her life.
Nora Eldridge is like a lot of middle-aged people. She believes she is living a lie. She thought she'd grow up to be a famous artist, to have a loving husband, and children. But she finds herself at forty trapped in the ordinary life of a spinster third-grade teacher. She sees herself as the invisible "woman upstairs" living a life of "quiet desperation," a woman with occasional unremarkable boyfriends and a few close girlfriends--a woman stuck in the role of being a moral citizen and a dutiful daughter.
The book starts at the end, when Nora is 42 and fully enraged at life. She is so full of anger that she is bound and determined to break out of the confines of her middling existence and finally start living an authentic life. Most of the balance of the book takes us back five years, to 2004, the year Nora meets and falls in love with each member, individually, of the Shahid family. Nora first falls in love with Reza, one of her new third-grade students. He's everything she wished her own child might have been. Next, she falls in love with Reza's mother, Sirena. She is Italian and an installation artist who has already attracted significant international fame. Sirena is everything Nora wished she could be. Finally, Nora falls in love with Skandar, Reza's father and Sirena's husband. He is Lebanese and participating in a one-year fellowship at Harvard to complete a book on history and ethics. He is someone who is sincerely interesting in just being with Nora and talking with her. He is the type of man Nora would have wanted to marry.
For that whole academic year, Nora's daily life is tied intimately to each member of the Shahid family. It is a year in which she is awash in love, a year in which she feels wholly "alive in the moment, a Sleeping Beauty awakened." It is a year in which she finally feels she is living an authentic life. "Oh great adventure! Life there, before me, the infinite banquet lying in wait."
But as we close this book, we ask ourselves: what was real and what was a lie? In fact, we find ourselves contemplating the very nature of reality itself.
The book is a thriller because there is something not quite right about the obsessive nature of Nora's love for Sirena, Reza, and Skandar. It's an all-consuming, compelling, and compulsive love, something very close to the murky mental illness territory of obsessive love, yet still balanced precariously, on the edge of normal. Readers are kept in a high state of tension fearing that somehow, Nora is going to step over the line, that something will go horribly wrong. And it does! But it is nothing that any reader would ever expect.
The twist at the end of this novel is a very real unraveling and unveiling of the complexity of life. There is nothing gimmicky about it. No, this is as authentic as it gets. Finally, you will understand Nora's rage...and perhaps, absolve her.
But understanding the deep psychological intricacies of this story is only half the pleasure. This book provides considerable intellectual depth and thematic richness. Not only will readers be left pondering the nature of reality and asking: What is reality? What is an authentic life? Is reality purely subjective? Readers will also be left contemplating a number of substantial ethical and philosophical questions. What is love? What is friendship? Is Nora right when she states: "The hubris of it, thinking I could be a decent human being and a valuable member of family and society, and still create! Absurd."
I hope you will choose to discover and experience this magnificent cerebral thriller for yourself. If this review has piqued your interest, I assure you that you will not be disappointed. "The Upstairs Woman" deserves every one of its five stars.
376 of 428 people found the following review helpful.
An "Un" Review of "The Woman Upstairs"...
By Spindrift
After reading through the reviews that have been posted before mine for "The Woman Upstairs" I find myself more compelled to tell potential readers of this book who should NOT read it, instead of who should.
The extraordinary Claire Messud's book will absolutely not benefit from a plot summary. It is a book that allows it's protagonist to introduce herself to you in a completely tantalizing way. Nora Eldridge will tell you everything that you need to know in short order. She is a fascinating character drawn with the fine brush and exquisite materials of a very elegant artist. Nora fancies herself an artist, and indeed, reading "The Woman Upstairs" is very much like standing in front of a beautiful, intricate, and extremely interesting painting, in an art museum. You may even want to sit down as you spend a preternatural amount of time staring at this magnificent piece...studying how the fine paint thickens in some areas and the colors resonate. You are imagining peeling back layers and layers until you have unfurled more and more of the work to find all of the hidden meaning that the artist has intended.
If you are someone that must "like" or identify with the characters in the books that you choose...don't choose this one. Nora is one of the most finely textured and unique figures in literature that you will ever meet. You will not understand her, love her, or warmly identify with her. I can't imagine why you would need to. She is a work of fine art, with a very sharp edge.
If you are adverse to learning about different and interesting art mediums...avoid this one. If you don't like paying very close attention to painstakingly well created, multi cultural, and nuanced characters, that have histories that are centered on real international events, and historical art figures who rocked the pop culture of their days...avoid this one. If you like tidy endings that don't leave you with the sense that something even more profound probably occurred...avoid this one. Messud creates an almost interactive exercise for the reader with her ending. If you don't appreciate carefully plotted but subtle psychological drama...leave this one alone.
This is wordy, erudite, and probably the best book of the year so far. But it is not an easy read. So tread very carefully...I just can't tell you any more, because I could not live with myself if I ruined this amazingly well crafted piece for any of you that are serious readers. This is literary fiction at it's very finest. But it requires a reader who is up to the task. If you are willing, you are about to embark on one of the most mercurial and profound reading experiences of your reading life.
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