Claire Messud’s 2013 novel, The Woman Upstairs, about a lonely middle-aged schoolteacher who becomes obsessed with the family of one of her students, is a compelling but puzzling read. The story itself is straightforward, presenting Nora Eldridge’s first-person account of her hum-drum existence teaching third grade in a Boston suburb, frustrated by goals unrealized, in her life, art and interpersonal relations, and enraged by what she perceives as American society’s marginalization of her kind: the unexceptional woman trained since birth to be “nice.”
Into Nora’s predictable existence comes the Shahid family, first in the person of her third grade student, Reza, then in Sirena, his mother, the beautiful artist, and, finally in Skandar, Sirena’s husband. Each member of the family bewitches Nora in some way and, by circumstance all are drawn closer to her. The book’s arc, however, traces the sad unwinding of her intimacy with the family. Ultimately, Nora feels the painful results of having invested herself too fully in her connection with the Shahids; she feels the sting of a final betrayal more keenly because she has, in different ways, given herself over to each member of the family, but particularly to Sirena, a proxy for the bolder, more cosmopolitan, more successful self Nora has never realized.
As readers we struggle to understand Messud’s view of Nora and, in turn, how to see the heroine ourselves. We know, if only from Messud’s biography, that this is fiction, not memoir. Yet there are few signs of separation between creator and creation. In this first-person narration, we have only Nora’s words, which are clean, often self-lacerating, and, for most of the book, convincing. She has few deficiencies which allow us to identify a gap between her intelligence and that of the author; the latter seems complicit in forgiving her unrelenting focus on the Shahids, granting her the excuse of love which, while always teetering on the edge of mania, for the most part feels warm and genuine.
Nora is such an acute observer of her own life that she catches and describes her weaknesses, wayward moods, self-deceptions, and unrealistic hopes even before we readers can mock her obsession or criticize her choices. For the most part, her story is taut, gripping, well-structured. There is no rambling, no ravings of a madwoman in the attic. Only toward the book’s end, do we begin to tire of her, begin to feel that her hopes are unrealistic, her Shahid-centered life a true madness. But, then, the climax is so devastating, and her response to it so reasonable, under the circumstances, that we find ourselves again at one with her, allied against her betrayer.
One conclusion we may reach, then, is that Messud’s Nora, like Updike’s Rabbit, in some sense the projection of a parallel self, an identity unrealized in the world, but alive in the mind, nurtured inwardly, until it flowers in fiction.