The woman she is inside

Forty-two years old and single, she is the quintessential woman upstairs, smiling in public but quietly desperate.

Having inherited from her mother the notion that unpredictability is essential, she makes her own way, relying on no-one.

Unfortunately, her individualism has brought its own conformity, and taken a heavy toll.

She is a torn woman, “a good girl... a nice girl,” who tended her mother through years of cancer and is now nursing her ailing father. She abandoned her chance at marriage for bigger dreams, and fell short of the artistic life due to a fear of failure.

She works at an elementary school, and is the favourite teacher, not only of her young charges, but of their parents. The fathers flirt, the mothers are charmed by her quaint eccentricities, but no-one really notices her. And life is passing her by.

She realised this five years previously, and it’s here that the story’s plot, such as it is, unfurls. One day, a new student, Reza Sahid, arrives in class. He speaks hesitant English, but is bright, sensitive and inquisitive.

His family are on a year’s sabbatical from Paris.

His father, Skandar, is a Lebanese professor, visiting at Harvard; his mother, Sirena, is a renowned Italian conceptual artist. Nora is drawn to them, and their lives become briefly, but inextricably, entwined, and, for a while, they answer all her needs, maternal, romantic and artistic.

Influenced by Sirena’s enormous installation-in-progress, entitled ‘Wonderland’, Nora indulges her own art, in the form of minutely detailed dioramas inspired by the likes of Virginia Wolff and Emily Dickinson. But when the inevitable fractures appear, the consequences prove devastating.

“The person I am in my head,” she says, early on, “is so far from the person I am in the world.” Nora feels betrayed, by her loved ones and by herself. And, in the end, her colossal anger is all that remains.

But it is enough, because even when all else has been lost, “to be furious, murderously furious, is to be alive”. The anger is empowering, a full and open acknowledgement of a problem and, maybe, a means to an end.

For two decades, Claire Messud has been quietly establishing herself as one of the most striking literary voices of her generation. The Woman Upstairs, an odd, compelling tale that feeds on the dichotomy between reality and imagination, and burrows right to the heart of loneliness, further strengthens her claim.

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