Overview

Full Product Details

9780307913609

Table of Contents

Reviews

Terrifyingly perceptive . . . The Emperor's Children is a quite good novel, [but] The Woman Upstairs does far more with a smaller cast [and] has much greater weight. Messud wants to make a point that even successful people can suffer from a lethal celebrity complex. Nora Eldridge is a kind of Madame Bovary for our time, someone who dreams not of romantic passion but of personal fame, in which the envy of the less fortunate figures importantly. . . . Nora is like Emma Bovary in the conviction that she needs the love of glamorous and important individuals to give her life meaning. . . . One particular triumph of The Woman Upstairs is that Messud's heroine is so sympathetic, and so eloquent and convincing, that the depth of her illusions is not always apparent. . . . Because Messud has lent Nora her own outstanding gifts as a writer we cannot help believing what she tells us, at least for a while. --Alison Lurie, The New York Review of Books <br> The new novel by the author of The Emperor's Children is like Gone Girl meets The Bell Jar A lonely teacher's fixation on a student's family slowly drives her insane. Messud's magic power? Keeping her flawed protagonist relatable to the very end. --Megan Angelo, Glamour <br> In this literary page-turner, a Boston teacher with dreams of becoming an artist is first enamored of, and then feels betrayed by, a seductive couple who've relocated from Paris. --Abbe Wright, O, The Oprah Magazine <br> Almost without knowing it, I was hungry for Nora Eldridge, the hero of Messud's new novel. The title names an archetype: the nice, unmarried lady on the third floor who smiles in the lobby and is quickly forgotten. Nora is a caring schoolteacher seemingly content to look after her ailing father, her dreams of living the life of an artist subsumed by the act of simply living a life. Bitterly funny and self-aware, she claims to be having a 'Lucy Jordan moment, ' name-checking the Marianne Faithfull song .

Corrosively funny . . . Nora--a not-quite 40 schoolteacher as disappointed in her Katy Perry-obsessed students as she is in her own failed potential--finds her dormant creative passions awakened by a student's worldly mother, an artist who shows in Paris. An ardent friendship unfolds, ending in a betrayal that unleashes in Nora an eloquent, primal rage. Fifty years ago, Simone de Beauvoir faulted creative women for their unwillingness to 'dare to irritate, explore, explode, ' Two generations later, anger this combustible still feels refreshing. --Megan O'Grady, Vogue <br> Heartfelt and profound. . . . From the outset, it's been clear that Claire Messud has all the necessary equipment--a fertile imagination, a grown-up sensibility, and writerly ambition in spades--to write very good fiction, perhaps even a novel that defined our times. Her latest novel is an absolute page-turner, from its grab-you-by-the-collar opening to its final rumination on the creative uses of anger. . . . 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 accommodating 'nice girls, ' and the ruthlessness--the 'myopia'--that is necessary to pursue artistic ambition. It shows 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. Messud's skills are all on display here, [in] a work of fiction that is not just beautifully observed but also palpably inhabited by its gifted writer in a manner she has not quite da

Riveting . . . Messud is adept at evoking complex psychological territory, and here favors a controlled and notably unreliable style of narration. She is interested in the identities that women construct for themselves, and in the maddening chasm that often divides intensity of aspiration from reality of achievement. -- The New Yorker <br> Smoldering . . . a furious account of betrayal, the true source of which is withheld until the final pages. . . . Messud crams much into her portrait of Nora's life: tart meditations on the creative impulse and the artistic ego, on the interplay between reality and fantasy and the often-pitiful limits of human communication. . . . Nora's world is piercingly evoked. --Hephzibah Anderson, Bloomberg Businessweek <br> You know a Woman Upstairs; maybe you are one. . . . This is not a simple story of a sidekick woman thwarted by her own fear, and the betrayal that haunts the 'Shahid years' explodes in a sudden, cruel flash, forcing Nora's long-simmering anger to boil over into a justified rage. Messud is an immensely talented writer, and in Nora she gives us a compelling, complex, and unforgettable narrator. The Woman Upstairs is a brilliantly paced story of fearsome love and obsessive longing, and the boundaries and sacrifices of what is to be a woman and to be an artist in the world. --Amanda Bullock, Everyday eBook <br> [A] powerful psychological thriller . . . As in a fairy tale, Nora becomes spellbound by a family that seems to embody what she is missing. The power of self-deception is one of the key themes. . . . This is not just a novel of real psychological insight. It is also a supremely well-crafted page-turner with a shocker of an ending. --Julia M. Klein, The Boston Globe <br> <br> Thrums with fury . . . Startling: a psychological and intellectual thriller. -- Los Angeles Times <br> Tightly focused and intensely first-person . . . Nora storms onto the page in a fury to tell us the story of

A self-described 'good girl' lifts her mask in Messud's new novel. 'How angry am I?' Nora Eldridge rhetorically asks in her opening sentence. 'You don't want to know.' Nora is furious with herself: for failing to commit to being an artist, for settling for life as a third-grade teacher, for lacking the guts even to be openly enraged. Instead she is the woman upstairs, 'whose trash is always tidy, who smiles brightly in the stairwell.' So when the exotic Shahid family enters her life, Nora sees them as saviors. Reza is in her class; after another student attacks and calls the half-Lebanese boy 'a terrorist, ' she meets his Italian mother, Sirena, the kind of bold, assertive artist Nora longs to be. . . . Nora's untrustworthy narration, a feminine counterpoint to the rantings of Dostoevsky's Underground Man, is an astonishing feat of creative imagination: at once self-lacerating and self-pitying, containing enough truth to induce squirms. Messud persuasively plunges us into the tortured psyche of a conflicted soul . . . Brilliant and terrifying. -- Kirkus (starred review)

Author Information

CLAIRE MESSUD's last novel, The Emperor's Children, was a New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post Best Book of the Year, and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Her first novel, When the World Was Steady, and her book of novellas, The Hunters, were finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her second novel, The Last Life, won Britain's Encore Award. Her short fiction has been included in the Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories, edited by Jane Urquhart. Raised in Sydney, Australia and Toronto, where she attended the Toronto French School and UTS, Messud was a judge for the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize. She lives in Cambridge, MA with her family.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available