“How angry am I? You don’t want to know,” begins Claire Messud’s novel, in a sure hook if I’ve ever seen one. If I could, I would quote the entire first page because it establishes one of the most powerful and memorable feminist voices I have ever read in fiction: urgent and chillingly true. The quietly seething protagonist of
The Woman Upstairs, Nora Eldridge, is a teacher who has sidelined her art, because she is a rule-follower who fears risk and uncertainty. She is unmarried, single, without kids; intelligent, experienced, and incisive enough to pierce societal facades and expose the enduring gender conventions, stereotypes, and pressures that imprison women. Thus, Messud’s titular allusion to Bertha Mason, the first “madwoman in the attic.” Nora’s predictable life is enlivened by the arrival of the worldly Shahids, a family of famous Italian artist Sirena, Lebanese academic and intellectual Skandar and young, well-mannered Reza. In each of the Shahids Nora glimpses the revival of a life she thought to be long lost. With their flattery and tacit permission she returns to her art, sharing a studio with Sirena who is preparing for an upcoming art show in Paris; she engages in intellectual discussion with Skandar (though he talks and she mostly listens); and as she gets to know Reza, finding him the perfect child, she wishes she were his mother. She is filled with promise, until they betray her. Messud yields Nora’s confessional, vehement voice from beginning to end, lending the novel the pacing and tension of a psychological thriller. In
The Woman Upstairs Messud’s signature intellectual tone is invigorated by the unmoored passion of her protagonist, who grapples with the choices of her past and the promise of her future, burdened with the question of determinism as she is tormented by self-doubt and the sense of having no control to alter her fate. Messud has struck the finest balance between showing and telling: she has delivered one version of the tale of the modern woman that no one can ignore.
–Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow
Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs (2013)