The Woman Upstairs

Just today, as I was driving Mallory to school, she told me that I'm so lucky because I could just go back home and wrap myself in a blanket on the couch and stay there all day if I chose. I asked her if "lucky" is really the right word to describe that, and pointed out that the difference between me and her is that I've already gone through grade ten, thank you very much, and luck had nothing to do with it. "Aha," she said, "but so has Daddy and he still has to go to work. Which makes you the lucky one."

Lucky, huh? I dropped it because there's no diplomatic way to point out that being a stay-at-home Mom is a privilege and a sacrifice; there's no way that I would complain to my daughter about the boredom and lack of purpose and accomplishment that comes with what I do -- and especially not in a way that might make her feel like I was blaming her somehow for the life I freely chose. There are the things we say and the things we only think, and although Nora, the protagonist of The Woman Upstairs is an unmarried career-focussed woman, I think her opening rant is transferable to so many, many women:

I'm a good girl. I'm a nice girl. I'm a straight-A, strait-laced, good daughter, good career girl, and I never stole anybody's boyfriend and I never ran out on a girlfriend, and I put up with my parents' shit and brother's shit and I'm not a girl anyhow, I'm over forty fucking years old, and I'm good at my job and I'm great with kids and I held my mother's hand when she died, after four years of holding her hand while she was dying, and I speak to my father every day on the telephone -- every day, mind you, and what kind of weather do you have on your side of the river, because here it's pretty gray and a bit muggy too? It was supposed to say "Great Artist" on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say "such a good teacher/daughter/friend" instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL.

And although I have in my life the husband and children that Nora might covet, if my tombstone were to say "such a good wife/mother/daughter", as though that were the sum total of all my life, I might have such a rant inside me, too. 

I see people describing Nora as unlikeable and I would disagree with that. I've followed the threads to the Publishers Weekly interview and agree with Claire Messud that it was unfair when the journalist stated, "I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you?". The author's answer addresses the literary value of the question: For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t “is this a potential friend for me?” but “is this character alive?” I would have liked to have seen Messud address the question itself -- I can only answer for myself but I think I would like to be friends with Nora. By all accounts, despite whatever disappointments plague her interior life (and who of us don't have those?), Nora has been a wonderful friend to Didi (and Esther) over many years, her coworkers like her, and if you don't count the fact that Nora slept with Skandar, she was a good and supportive friend to Sirena as well. Her anger might be the principal fact of her storytelling, and maybe women have been conditioned to not express "inappropriate" emotions, but this isn't a public screed -- for all we know this entire story is just stewed upon inside Nora's head (my own favourite time to stew is while vacuuming, and while those aren't thoughts I'm likely to share, I think I'm likeable).

I found the notion of Skandar's work on the ethics of history to be interesting: I'll study the history of history, the ways that we tell the stories, and don't tell other stories, and I'll try to understand what it says about us, to tell one story rather than another, to tell it one way rather than another. When we first meet Nora, she's forty-three, has just discovered the climactic betrayal of this book, and reflects back on the path that brought her to that point starting five years earlier. Through Skandar's lens, Nora's story appears to be an ethical recounting of events: she paints a lovely introductory picture of each of the Shahids and boasts of their talents and attractions. It's as though Nora has taken a lesson from Skandar and has decided to educate us about Germany through the history of its artists, thinkers and composers, only mentioning Hitler after we have become enamoured of the country. This effort, which Skandar calls ideal but impossible in the telling of history, may well be impossible in personal stories as well -- Nora can't help but be coloured by her outrage, and by page 71 she says, The very fact that I can tell you without blinking that I could kill them -- that above all I could kill her -- says all that needs to be said. 

With the great opening and teasing premise, I really wanted to love The Woman Upstairs. David Gilmour, the Canadian author who is teaching some literature classes at the U of T , is in the news recently saying:

I’m not interested in teaching books by women. I’ve never found—Virginia Woolf is the only writer that interests me as a woman writer, so I do teach one short story from Virginia Woolf. But once again, when I was given this job I said I would teach only the people that I truly, truly love. And, unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women. Um. Except for Virginia Woolf. And when I try Virginia Woolf, I find she actually doesn’t work. She’s too sophisticated. She’s too sophisticated for even a third-year class. So you’re quite right, and usually at the beginning of the semester someone asks why there aren’t any women writers in the course. I say I don’t love women writers enough to teach them, if you want women writers go down the hall. What I’m good at is guys… Yeah, very serious heterosexual guys…I teach only the best.

At first, The Woman Upstairs made me believe that it would be the perfect novel to ship off to David Gilmour; the feminine exception to his masculine rule. I do understand, and don't necessarily disagree with, his penchant for teaching books written by other men. If I were the type to fire off angry emails, I would have pointed out to Gilmour that were I to teach a course on literature, I would probably select a reading list that reflects my own favourite books, and they would likely all be by women; that's who I relate to. What I object to in his statement is that he only teaches "the best", and in The Woman Upstairs I thought I was discovering a novel that would fit his definition. But as strong as this book began, it didn't sustain its power for me. The greatest disappointment in that fact is because it promised to speak to me so personally. 

Nora was born in the same year I was (1967) and an early statement resonated with me: 

How did all that revolutionary talk of the seventies land us in a place where being female means playing dumb and looking good? Even worse on your tombstone than "dutiful daughter" is "looking good"; everyone used to know that. But we're lost in a world of appearances now.

Besides knowing that women are more than our looks (hear us roar), the one thing that growing up in the seventies taught me was that I had every imaginable career open to me…except for stay-at-home wife and mother. It would be interesting if I tried to explain to my daughters that what looks like a traditional choice (a lucky one?) is actually the rebellious one. This scene between Nora and her mother could have happened between me and my own allowance-dependant mother:

And suddenly, then -- inexplicably to me as I was, but in a way so obvious to me now -- she turned viperish, rageful, a temper as shameful in the A&P as her earlier tears. "Don't ever get yourself stuck like this," she hissed. "Promise me? Promise me now?...You need to have your own life, earn your own money, so you're not scrounging around like a beggar, trying to put ten dollars together for your kids' Christmas presents. Leeching off your father's -- or your husband's -- pathetic paycheck. Never. Never. Promise me?"

But despite these personalised hits, and despite the empathy I had for Nora's anger, I never connected with her as a character. This book felt like it was all structure and was missing heart. Does that mean I'm looking for a more traditional "woman's story", one that doesn't make it to David Gilmour's reading list? Perhaps. I was also prompted to look up Claire Messud on wikipedia and followed the link to her husband, James Wood. Imagine being an author married to a famous literary critic? In my mind, writers bounce ideas and partially written chapters off their friends and families, most especially their spouses, but I cannot imagine this being a casual experience in Messud's home (not that I expect it to ever be entirely casual). According to her husband's wikipedia page: Wood advocates an aesthetic approach to literature, rather than more ideologically-driven trends in academic literary criticism. In an interview with The Harvard Crimson, Wood explains that the "novel exists to be affecting...to shake us profoundly. When we're rigorous about feeling, we're honoring that." The reader, then, should approach the text as a writer, "which is [about] making aesthetic judgments." It is precisely for this reason, that I was not profoundly shaken, that I feel let down by The Woman Upstairs. At the same time, I thought it was technically a marvel, each sentence as well written as any of Gilmour's "very serious heterosexual guys". The jumbled thoughts and meandering sentences felt so very well-crafted, and sometimes they worked to set the mood:

Following Serena and the toothless real estate agent to the third floor -- I'd never seen a realtor so battered by life as Eddie Roy, a lanky, greasy-haired man in his late sixties, only two steps from the homeless shelter -- I felt nothing but misgivings: the whiff of burning plastic with an undertone of mouse, or rat; the trippable hollows in the steps from decades of trudging feet; the dim, high bulbs shedding light like dust in the corridors; the spatter and rattle of the rain upon the windows and the windows in their ancient sockets, surely like the rattling of the agent's teeth before they fell -- it was all of a bleakness unimagined.

And sometimes they were just confusing:

Like a Zen master, she reduced to the essences: I do not need to walk around the Museum of Fine Arts; I do not need to be pushed around the MFA in a chair; I do not need the MDA at all, because its treasures, as I love them, are imprinted in the memory; and if they are wrongly memorized -- a lily where there are tulips, the boy's torn hat rakish at the wrong angle -- then this only makes the pictures the more mine.

The fact that the women each made art installations, one in miniature and one room-sized, was an intriguing juxtaposition, but the details of the art itself and the art world in general were a little dull to me. And while I loved that Nora would hide a tiny golden figure of Joy in each of her dioramas, it made me feel strangely manipulated to have her own greatest moment of joy, her channeling of Edie Sedgewick, be the instrument of her betrayal. Nora is reminiscent of Barbara in What Was She Thinking [Notes on a Scandal], but I think the closer comparison would be to Rachel in A Jest of God -- and most especially because they were each invisible women who were punished for daring to reach for Joy.

Back to the notion of Nora's likeability, in an interview with The National Post, Messud said:

“Don’t go around asking the question, ‘Is this character likeable?’ and expect that to be compatible with serious literary endeavours,” she continues. “That’s not what it’s about. If you want self-help that’s going to make you feel good, or you want the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, fantastic, that’s a great thing to read, I have no complaints about that. But it’s not compatible with serious endeavours.”

The Woman Upstairs is pointedly a "serious literary endeavor" and it's no coincidence that Messud compares Nora to the great unlikeable male characters of fiction (the same characters that populate David Gilmour's reading list), and by extension, she ranks herself among those serious male authors (it's surely no coincidence that, like Humbert Humbert at the end of Lolita, Nora is slightly repulsed by the sight of the no-longer-a-child Reza Shahi). Messud is also somewhat famous for saying, a la Jonathan Franzen and his rejection of the Oprah Book Club honour for The Corrections, that she was appalled that her novels had "become the kind of crap you buy at airports". Of her reluctance to show her artwork, Nora says, "I just wanted to be got, and didn't trust that I would be." I am sorry to say that, although I can appreciate the skill with which The Woman Upstairs was written, I didn't totally get the artistry of it.

Maybe it would fit into Gilmour's reading list after all.

Regarding the notion of finding things that I connected with, here are a few more examples:

You know those moments, at school or college, when suddenly the cosmos seems like one vast plan after all, patterned in such a way that the novel you're reading at bedtime connects to your astronomy lecture, connects to what you heard on NPR, connects to what your friend discusses in the cafeteria at lunch -- and then briefly it's as if the lid has come off the world, as if the world were a dollhouse, and you can glimpse what it would be like to see it whole, from above -- a vertiginous magnificence. 

I think I've made it clear that my life is full of this vertiginous magnificence -- but in this book, I didn't find it lead to deeper understanding.

 But do you know this idea of the imaginary homeland? Once you set out from shore on your little boat, once you embark, you'll never truly be at home again. What you've left behind exists only in your memory, and your ideal place becomes some strange imaginary concoction of all you've left behind at every stop.

This quest for the imaginary homeland is what I fear captured my own parents when they retired back to Nova Scotia; a homeland that I know has not been satisfying for them. And as they age, as they approach an age where they just might need their "good girl" to check in on them, to hold their hands as they lay dying, what has the escape from us profited them? 


And the last idea that spoke to me (with no succinct quote) was when Nora first sees Sirena and realises that she is seeing her, is hoping that Sirena will see her, too. Is this the thunderstrike of soulmates? I've never had this experience, and it is interesting to me that I have only heard of it spoken of by the live-in-boyfriend (one day to be husband of?) my lovely sister-in-law, Ruthann. She was one of these so-called invisible women, a woman upstairs, unmarried and childless at 38 and resigned to that status. And then she met Dan. Introduced by a mutual friend, they went on a date, had a nice time, but although Ruthann was excited about him, Dan did not call her back. She took the initiative and set up the next date and they have been inseparable ever since (7 years now?). When Ruthann tells this story, Dan will add, "We did have a good time and I can't explain why I didn't call. I just didn't know it was her yet. It wasn't long after that I said to Ruthann, 'How did I not know it was you?'" She will say, "It's okay, because right from the start, I knew it was you."  


Because this book had the potential to connect with me on a very deep level, I am doubly disappointed by its failure to pay off. And a final complaint -- I read this because it's a Giller Prize finalist and Claire Messud hardly seems Canadian enough to qualify for the prize, I'm sure she doesn't self-identify as Canadian, and this is not one of our stories.

Harrumph.