'Woman Upstairs': Friendly On The Outside, Furious On The Inside
Sirena invites Nora to share a Somerville studio. In Wonderland, her new project, Sirena is combining Lewis Carroll's Alice with the vision of the 12th-century Muslim philosopher Ibn Tufail, who wrote a novel about a boy "growing up alone on a desert island, discovering everything — including himself and God." Inspired by Sirena, Nora works on a series of Joseph Cornell-scaled dioramas, beginning with a miniature replica of Emily Dickinson in her bedroom. She envisions similar boxes with Virginia Woolf writing her suicide note at Rodmell, Alice Neel in her sanatorium room after a nervous breakdown, and Edie Sedgwick in her room in Andy Warhol's Factory. Meanwhile, Skandar gives her what amounts to a private tutorial in Middle Eastern history. (When he is upset about the assassination of Prime Minister Rafic Hariri in Beirut, Nora Googles "Lebanon war.")
The Woman Upstairs brims with energy and ideas. In what Nora refers to as a "manic unfolding," she experiences "a sort of awakening, a type of excitement about the wider world." As her infatuation with the Shahids grows, she seems disturbingly off-balance, aware she is making more of the relationship than they. "Both with Sirena and Skandar, I veered between fantasies of intimacy and of bleak rejection," she muses.
The book also functions in part as a suspenseful psychological thriller, propelled by the question of what has so enraged Nora. When the answer comes, the revelation doesn't quite match the furious buildup. But the core of The Woman Upstairs — Messud's intimate portrait of two women artists, Nora, the inhibited American "woman upstairs," constrained by reality and working in miniature, and Sirena, the European "Purveyor of Dreams," capable of drawing upon East and West, Then and Now, Imaginary and Real — is brilliant. Messud's description of Wonderland as it grows from everyday items — aspirin, soap, shards of mirror — into a magical universe filled with monstrosity and wonder, lingers, as does her Nora, an artist who learns that a good definition of any artist in the world is "a ruthless person" — and that her fury may be no substitute for ruthlessness.
Read an excerpt of The Woman Upstairs