Michelle Bailat-Jones

Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs came out last year and there’s been quite a bit of discussion about it. I really like Messud’s writing (I’ve read her two novellas, The Hunters and A Simple Tale, as well as her big novel, The Emperor’s Children), mostly because she is a fiercely intelligent and intellectual writer, but also because of the way she works carefully at thorny emotional questions in her books. She can do social satire as well as intimate personal/domestic – so I was quite curious to read The Woman Upstairs and now that I’ve finished it, it’s exactly the kind of book I’d really like to discuss.

Briefly, the book is about a fortyish woman named Nora. And the book is, at least on the surface, about her anger at what life has dealt her, but also at the overall outcome of her choices and a long-chain of events that has led her to a certain moment—in this are family situations (the death of her mother being the most important, but also her childhood and her self-conception as having developed from her particular family with its specific emotional currents) and professional situations (her work as a 3^rd grade teacher, her years-earlier decision to give up her dream of becoming a professional artist). Nora narrates the book, and she focuses her narrative on a single relationship, an odd kind of intense love triangle between herself and three others: Sirena, Skandar and Reza Shahid. The Shahids are a family (Reza is their young son and Nora is his teacher), and Nora and Sirena become friends and artistic collaborators (of a kind).

In the way that I have come to admire, Messud takes up a number of difficult questions in the story—namely, the particular solitude of a single childless woman in contemporary American society, the compromises a person makes in terms of fulfilling artistic dreams, the strange pull of female friendships, and also essential notions of desire and attraction and love. There is really a lot going on in the book, and she doesn’t work at these questions perfunctorily but instead she spends a lot of time on them, revisiting them in different situations and with different characters. It makes for the kind of book you can read forward and backward, slowly. Messud invites a kind of conscious reflection on Nora’s explanations and judgments, on her opinions and decisions, and so I often found myself asking – Is that true? Does it really feel like that? Do people feel that way? Do I feel that way?

I like a book that solicits this kind of engagement from me. And I love the scale of Messud’s social commentary. She can do satire (The Emperor’s Children) but in The Woman Upstairs she is decidedly never making fun of Nora Eldridge, even if the book can be funny at times.  Instead, she is taking Nora very seriously—even when Nora might be difficult, or pathetic—and I found the seriousness of Messud’s project quite touching. Really, the book is a dissection of an individual’s unhappiness. Of a woman’s unhappiness. I think the distinction is important, and I think Messud makes it overtly.

One thing that struck me, however, was that the book’s emphasis on self-reflection and its choice to have Nora speak directly to the reader means that it also involves a tension between direct scene and thought-based exposition. Or, put another way, the book relies more heavily on Nora’s thinking than it does on Nora’s behavior. What she does is obviously there, but what she thinks is always and consistently forefronted. She is, quite literally, almost always “telling.” I found this a curious choice simply because the book is so much about Nora’s anger and the kind of person it has made her. Now, Nora is dealing with a simmering anger, a kind of just-barely controlled resentment—and so much of the book’s tension is wrapped up in waiting to see when she might lose control. I was surprised, in fact, at how little she does. I don’t mean big overwhelming eruptions, because I think that Messud is making a point that unless Nora intends to self-destruct (the option at one end of the anger spectrum – and something she will not ever do) she will internalize and hold it together no matter what. But Nora doesn’t ever really slip up. Not even little things. I’ll admit that because of this, it was sometimes easy to lose sight of her anger.

Finally, something else that struck me as interesting was the way the book is structured. It opens at a present-tense point, Nora in the here and now, and in this here and now she is furiously angry. At her life in general, but also because of something very specific. She then moves backward four years to begin the story of that very specific thing. And then the entire story rolls out – nearly 300 pages of it, all of it in that four years earlier time period, briefly interrupted by even earlier flashbacks. It isn’t until only a few pages from the end that we catch up to that first present-day period and where, essentially, we can now deal directly with Nora’s anger and its consequences. But it’s strange because Messud doesn’t do very much with this—she addresses it, of course, and in an intriguing (even a courageous way, I would say) way, but it is extremely brief. It surprised me. And I say courageous because Messud uses this story of Nora’s anger and what it might do/become as a launching off point into a future we cannot (or may not be able to) easily envision – if Nora can transform herself, in some way transcend the anger that has characterized her, it is only through the reader’s determination to agree with this possibility, really it is only through a trick of the reader’s imagination. That’s a fascinating idea – and one I’m still thinking about.

I originally wrote this post on The Emperor’s Children in 2007, just a few months after I’d started blogging. I thought about the book again recently, because it came up in a discussion about how women writers handle satire. I’ve kept it in mind as a reference, because I remember admiring how Messud handled the balance of mocking her characters and subtly criticizing the reader.

Here is what I originally wrote:

Satire makes for uncomfortable reading precisely because of its preoccupation with exposure. Its desire to ridicule the very object of its scrutiny. From the safe distance of the reader’s outside view, satire is always good for a laugh. An easy way to indulge in some effortless criticism of society or an individual. But taken to heart, which is satire’s most difficult lesson, it’s not always easy to swallow. The truly skilled satirist manages to eloquently pass judgment on both the reader and the subject.

In The Emperor’s Children, Claire Messud reveals herself to be quite up to satire’s thorny task. She gives us a cast of socialite New Yorkers centered around three friends – Danielle, Julius, and Marina, all literate, all literary, and all too-ready to compromise family, friends and even health for nothing more than a one-night stand, a glamorous job, or a regular mention in the people pages. These characters are all so self-involved they manage to pass from the day before 9/11 to the day after without batting an eyelash. And the enormity of that event gets quickly swept under the carpet of each character’s more petty trials and tribulations. Or, I should say, 9/11 drowns in the backwash of the smaller events that these three, until that moment, have placed upon their personal altars of consequence.

Danielle has an affair with Marina’s father, a powerful literary figure with an unbelievably dedicated and morally sound wife. Marina pretends to literary aspirations when her real passion is focused on gaining the admiration of an up-and-coming magazine editor. Julius proclaims literary and artistic independence (meaning he won’t get a job even though he’s poor) while abusing his body in an endless spiral of sexual promiscuity and drug abuse. Murray, Marina’s father, is the so-called Emperor of this tribe. An apparent success and a man who considers himself resolutely posited against “the establishment”. Each and every one of them gnash their teeth, expound on the virtues of their superior minds, and plead the case for the uniqueness of their sensitive souls.

Messud sets her characters down atop a detailed canvas she calls American New York, replete with Armani suits and summer homes, ample cocaine and easy trysts, then she lets them machinate, whine, harangue, and battle each other and themselves for the purely trivial. And just when we think we’re ready to snigger and laugh out loud at these small-minded humans, Messud gives them just enough humanity to remind us that we are often in the same boat. We are often consumed by the same insignificant crises, aspire to the same shallow notoriety, and affect the same passionate support for worthy causes. So in the end, the reader’s sniggering is measured with a guilty chuckle and our admiration for Messud’s skill countered with a flush of embarrassment.

Now, almost five years later, thinking of Messud with respect to Pym (one of the other examples of satire I’ve read recently), I find that while Pym’s satire strikes me as having sharper teeth in terms of its delivery, its focus is somewhat smaller and more personal. Messud, on the other hand, takes on an entire society, an entire way of thinking. In The Emperor’s Children, she takes on America, as it were, and the myths of American culture. So although the feel of her satire is a bit softer, it brings the reader around to a powerful critique.

Both ways of engaging in satire are fun to experience, yet I think I prefer Pym’s variety while I’m actually reading, because it is so wonderfully clever and sharp. Messud’s gives less of an immediate wicked chuckle, but it bears out interestingly in the long term.