It would be perverse to call Nora Eldridge self-indulgent since, after all, self-indulgence is the whole point. Nora, the protagonist of Claire Messud's novel The Woman Upstairs, is a self-contained third-grade teacher who lacks the courage to pursue an artist's life; with middle age looming on the horizon, she seizes an opportunity to indulge in a passion that is as all-consuming as it is careful, discreet, and apparently harmless: she falls in love with a couple and their young son, both singly and as a group. The inevitable betrayal arrives all too predictably. She gets angry. End of story.
But wait! What will she do with that anger? We'll never know because the book ends, just like that, leaving behind the bitter image of an isolated woman fondling her anger in the dark, a masturbatory act much like the one that lies hidden at the center of the plot. "You don't want to know how angry I am," declares Nora near the end of the brief novel, but she's wrong: I want to know not just how angry she is but where than anger will lead her. If, as she insists, this anger has liberated her, convincing her that "to be furious, murderously furious, is to be alive," then I want to see what she'll do with that new life.
But alas, the book ends without providing an answer. The Woman Upstairs is a closed room much like the shoe-box diorama Nora creates: a woman alone between walls pierced by windows but no door, no escape, so the viewer/voyeur can peer through the glass and observed the trapped woman's loneliness just as the reader/voyeur observes the helpless Nora. What if someone smashed a hole in the wall to release Nora along with her all-consuming anger? That's the novel I'd like to read.
2 comments:
Maybe you should write it?
Ooh, now there's a thought...
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