THE WOMAN UPSTAIRS by Claire Messud (Knopf), 253 pages, $29.95 cloth. Messud reads at Luminato’s literary gala, Evening Illumination, on June 20 and at the Literary Picnic on June 22. luminatofestival.com. For a Q&A with Messud, go to nowtoronto.com/books. Rating: NNNNN
The first page of The Woman Upstairs is so gobsmackingly good – profound and profane – that you’re sure author Claire Messud won’t be able to sustain the energy for 250 pages.
To reference a key line in the book: just watch her.
Nora is a likeable elementary school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 40-something, single and on the outside unassuming – “the woman upstairs” – who’s retired her dream of becoming a visual artist.
When the Shahid family comes into her life (Reza, an impossibly beautiful boy, is one of her students), Nora suddenly sees life possibilities she thought she’d given up forever. Reza’s mother, Sirena, who’s on the verge of art stardom via her mammoth installations, invites Nora to share a studio with her, feeding her artistic aspirations.
Boundaries start blurring when Nora occasionally babysits for Sirena and Reza’s father Skandar, an attractive Lebanese academic lecturing at Harvard, makes a point of walking her home after every shift.
Soon she’s falling in love with all three of them. But her most fraught relationship is with Sirena, whose character Messud expertly develops. She’s at once magnanimous and withholding, encouraging when it comes to Nora’s creativity and wholly self-centred when it comes to her own art. But this last quality is precisely what Nora finds so moving.
We know from the first page that something not good is going to happen, but that’s what makes a near-perfectly constructed narrative. As the story unfolds, even as blissed-out Nora is merrily rolling along, the tension becomes unbearable. Try guessing what will go wrong – that won’t take away from the ending’s devastating impact.
The Woman Upstairs is an ingenious examination of ego, longing and the making of an artist.
And, miraculously, the last page is even better than the first.
susanc@nowtoronto.com | @susangcole
