“Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had? … I haven’t done so enough before—and now I’m too old; too old at any rate for what I see. … What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. … Still, we have the illusion of freedom; therefore don’t be, like me, without the memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it; I don’t quite know which. Of course at present I’m a case of reaction against the mistake. … Do what you like so long as you don’t make my mistake. For it was a mistake. Live!” – Henry James The Ambassadors
That’s my favorite Henry James quote, from his matchless novel. It’s an apt introduction to Claire Messud’s daring, Jamesian new novel that takes so many chances and provokes so many questions.
It all focuses on one character, Nora (think Ibsen) Eldridge, and what happens to her, what is done to her. You could take the feminist, culturally conditioned view. I suppose that’s the point of reference that most women who read this book will take.
There’s also a broader approach about how much our 21st century society is a racing meritocracy with diminishing resources. One consequence: winning is the only thing that matters. You should take any advantage, perform any act, that allows you to get ahead. First win the glittering prize, then play nice afterwards if you like.
Nora is the Woman Upstairs. Always pleasant when you run into her in the hallway. Always well dressed, always helpful, keeps a lovely apartment. But you don’t think about her that much. It’s more like she’s part of the furniture in your world. Always in the background. The book cover that I saw shows a window curtain being parted as if someone is peeking out. That’s the woman upstairs.
Claire Messud is a truth teller about the ruthlessness of art. There’s an awesome section of the story where Nora, an unmarried elementary school teacher, is persuaded to share a studio loft with the electrically charged Serena Shahid, an Italian artist whose career has plateaued. Serena is looking for her next breakthrough before she is relegated to has-been status.
Nora was an aspirational artist when she was younger but has since settled for much less. Much of the novel, which serves as Nora’s autobiography, is the story of how she has settled for much less; how Nora learned she could win social acceptance by fading into the wallpaper, being the helper, the good friend, the sidekick.
Nora and Serena share the artist loft to cover its expenses. Nora used to have what I’d call a play or hobbyist studio in the second bedroom of her apartment. But she was swept up enough by Serena’s charisma to share an artist space with her. You sense that Serena needed a useful body to share the loft with her, so she conscripted Nora, the way people with a life can conscript people who don’t have one.
Nora works on her shoebox size dioramas of the rooms of feminist icons. She seems to work on a miniature of Emily Dickinson’s bedroom forever. Serena works on “Wonderland” a vast installation, a mixed media piece which employs video, cameras, a facsimile of Lewis Carroll’s wonderland mixed with Middle Eastern themes. A giant mechanical open heart, which is engineered to spew out rosewater, is central to the piece. Messud does a grand job of imagining Serena’s masterwork.
Nora is drawn to what Serena is working on to the neglect of her own project. Serena pours on the syrupy charm, with smiles, caresses, pledges of eternal friendship. Nora ends up doing a lot of grunt work and also offering advice to Serena on her installation.
Messud makes a key point about creative work. It means smashing boundaries, using imagination to remake the world. It’s Serena who’s doing professional work while Nora, with her recessive and fading fantasies that she’s an artist also, having a hobby, making exact copies of rooms from women’s history. James has a character say in The Ambassadors that if you want to succeed at anything then you must give your whole soul to it. Nora has been trained to hold back, to compromise.
If you’ve ever wondered if you’re sounding too needy to your friends, then you doubtlessly are. Nora needs Serena and her family, which consists enchanting child Reza and Serena’s husband, Skandar. Skandar is a visiting fellow, a Lebanese scholar, at Harvard. They will be in town for about a year before returning to home base in Paris.
Nora will babysit for Reza while Serena and Skandar attend academic functions. She will form a strong emotional attachment to each member of the family, falling in love with both Serena and her husband, and loving the darling Reza as the child that she never had. She will bring expensive gourmet snacks that she probably cannot afford to the studio for Serena. Messud makes even third grader Reza seem seductive. Nora is his teacher.
Nora is like family. She is their beloved, indispensable friend. Nora falls into the fuller life of the Shahids. It becomes the life she never had. She “borrows” their life because she doesn’t have her own, living off their glamor, lapping up the closeness of having a family.
As to what happens to Nora, there might be a gender split in perspective. I think women are more likely to sympathize with her while men are more likely to blame the victim. Does the victim ever deserve blame? Does Nora have to blame herself?
There’s a nightmarish character in The Woman Upstairs, “Aunt Baby”. This is a senior relative of Nora’s, an elderly woman who confronts our scary world with a childlike immaturity. Never married, never fucked, she’s Messud’s archetype of an unfulfilled personality. There was a mature, sophisticated woman somewhere inside Aunt Baby that never came out of her shell.
Messud is such a gifted painter of our choices and their consequences. She’s never gone this deep before in showing us how our reality and our pipe dreams intersect. Her portrait of Nora Eldridge, a highly competent and decent woman, who has perhaps crossed the wrong bridges in her life, would move stone.
What’s going to become of Nora? What will the Shahids do to her? Move over Emperor’s Children. The Woman Upstairs is now Claire Messud’s greatest novel.
