Books to the Ceiling

‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins….’ The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud

May 26, 2013 at 1:52 pm (Book review, books)

One of my favorite fiction titles of 2006 was this one: 

The Emperor’s Children is about three friends, all of whom had attended Brown University. Now living in New York City, all three are about to enter their thirties without having made their mark on the world, something they felt, with their Ivy League educations, they were destined to do. The action begins in the spring of 2001. The characters experience the shock of nine eleven, yet the trauma does not, for the most part, materially alter their lives.

I thought Claire Messud told this story masterfully. The writing was wonderful, enlivened both by effortless wit and her deep empathy for her characters. So when I heard that she had a new novel coming out, I was filled with happy anticipation.

You probably know what’s coming…. 

Here’s how The Woman Upstairs begins:

How angry am I? You don’t want to know. Nobody wants to know about that.

The narrator, one Nora Eldridge, goes on to spew out copious amounts of  rage, liberally laced with profanity. She obviously doesn’t give a hoot regarding whom she offends or scandalizes. (And trust me, she wouldn’t have said “hoot.”)

Now some might call this a powerful, even a bravura performance. As for me, I wanted to throw the book across the room. Or at least, close it, sigh deeply, and move on to something else. (It is, after all, a library book, so one doesn’t want to damage the merchandise.) After all, why should I care about this irritating woman and her seemingly endless list of grievances?

Nora Eldridge is what the French used to term (and possible still do) “une femme d’un certain age.” In her early forties, childless and never married, she’s by profession an elementary school teacher (irony of ironies). By aspiration, however, she is an artist. One of her students is an attractive little boy named Reza Shahid.  When Reza’s mother Sirena comes in for a conference, she and Nora discover that they have much in common. Sirena is also an artist. She’s Italian; her husband Skandar is Lebanese. They have planned a one year stay in Boston. As the days progress, Nora becomes closer and more intensely involved in the lives of all three members of the Shahid family.

Now it does not take predictive genius to intuit that this tangle of relationships will probably culminate in some kind of crisis. What exactly will happen, though, the reader is left to guess. The problem is, has the reader been made to care enough that this speculation is worth entering upon? I’m on the fence about this question; in fact, I’m on the fence about the entire book. The kind of novel I most enjoy is one in which events seem to unfold naturally and spontaneously and yet with a certain inevitability. You know the kind of thing I mean – you’re halfway through the book before you take stock of how much you’ve actually read.  But with The Woman Upstairs, I was aware of the plot machinery being manipulated. It’s as if the author was thinking, Now what can I cause to happen in Nora’s life that will illuminate her character and at the same time drive the plot forward? Oh I know: I’ll have her meet this family: an appealing young boy, an artist mother, an attractive, slightly mysterious father – and I’ll add a combustible element or two and see what happens.

In other words, the set-up struck me as contrived. And yet….

There’s some powerful writing in this novel. At one point, Nora is fighting her way through what is for her, as for so many unhappy people, the worst time of the year. She has spent it with her aging aunt and father; the talk has been mostly about friends and acquaintances with serious and in some cases terminal illnesses, and who was taking care of whom.

I was, by then, burning, not sleeping. Who would do the same for me, in my dotage? Who would be my good girl?….No: I derived a certain bitter thrill thinking that I’d manage to the end on my own, a thrill of denial and austerity, a thrill not unlike a dieter’s pleasure at her gnawing stomach. I will be continent. I will continue. I will not spill into the lives of others, greedily sucking and wanting and needing. I will not, I will ask nothing, of anyone; I’ll just burn, from the inside out, self-immolating like those monks doused in gasoline. Spontaneous combustion, almost. Almost.

She ends this tirade by hurling profanity at Christmas.

At times, one is grateful for the Shahid complication. Otherwise, this novel would be one long rant. But more than that: it would be one long howl of pain. Beneath all the anger, there is clearly a woman who is being driven around the bend by an almost paralyzing loneliness. Allusions to T.S. Eliot, the early twentieth century’s great poet of anxiety and dread, appear frequently. When Nora firs meets Sirena, she is powerfully struck by the sensation of encountering a kindred spirit:

It was the strangest feeling, of relief and alarm at the same time. Like seeing a ghost. like seeing a ghost or having an epiphany–who is he who walks always beside you?–a feeling that you have no choice but to trust completely.

Nora needs desperately to make just such a connection. She’d spent years nursing her mother through her final illness, and as a result, felt bereft. She struggles to articulate the experience, and its aftermath, so Sirena will understand:

And I told her about how I used to paint big messy pictures, but  how when my mother was sick, and for all the years she was dying, one small capacity at a time, I stopped being able to paint, stopped being able to make any big gestures at all, and turned instead to little things, to rooms the size of show boxes, Joseph Cornell-scaled dioramas, as if these, at least, could not be taken from me–these are the fragments I have shored against my ruin.

As I was reading The Woman Upstairs, I kept pausing to analyze my feelings about Nora. Did I pity her? Admire her? Something in between? At times she annoyed me; at other times she aroused feelings of compassion. Interestingly, in a recent interview with Claire Messud in Publishers Weekly, the interview asks if she, Messud, would want to be friends with a woman like Nora Eldridge , whose outlook on life is “almost unbearably grim.”  Messud responds with a tirade of her own:

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?” Nora’s outlook isn’t “unbearably grim” at all. Nora is telling her story in the immediate wake of an enormous betrayal by a friend she has loved dearly. She is deeply upset and angry. But most of the novel is describing a time in which she felt hope, beauty, elation, joy, wonder, anticipation—these are things these friends gave to her, and this is why they mattered so much. Her rage corresponds to the immensity of what she has lost. It doesn’t matter, in a way, whether all those emotions were the result of real interactions or of fantasy, she experienced them fully. And in losing them, has lost happiness.

Whether you can enjoy a novel whose central character is not very sympathetic is a question worth pondering. Indeed, I have pondered it, along with other readers, at various book club discussions. And the fact is, The Woman Upstairs would make a terrific book club selection. By the second chapter, I was dying to talk to someone about it; the feeling only intensified as I read on.

One more comment about this novel. Unlike many works of contemporary fiction – including crime fiction – this novel has a terrific ending. You could say that in a matter of moments, the Woman Upstairs attains something that she’s been striving for all along: a purpose driven life. Is there an irony in how this comes about? I’m not sure. It’s one of the many things I need to discuss with you, after you’ve read the book.

Claire Messud

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A long goodbye to The Long Exile

May 14, 2013 at 1:45 am (Book review, books)

  It is time – past time! – for me to bid farewell to The Long Exile by Melanie McGrath. I’ve already written about this remarkable book, in conjunction with a discussion of this author’s mystery White Heat. I liked the mystery, with some reservations, but I love The Long Exile, with no reservations. Here are some of the reasons why:

The little boy would have spent his first few months of life in Maggie’s amiut. There he would have lain warm and naked, the filling in a sandwich of animal fur and human skin. His earliest view of a landscape, one whose contours he would never forget, would have been the rise and fall of his mother’s strong, sealskin-scented back. When he was hungry, his mother would have lifted him from the hood and put him to her breast. When he shat, she would have cleaned his naked skin with her hair. For months he would have slept, watching the Arctic world go by, and dreamed. By the time summer came he would probably have already been eating what would become the mainstay of his diet, seal meat, chewed and softened by Maggie. Already the breezes and the low contours of the land would have been familiar to him. He would have had a strong sense of where he was.
………………………………………………………………………
The only land lying between the d’Iberville and northern Siberia, 1,500 miles distant across the polar ice cap, was the mountainous ice capped terrain of Ellesmere Island. It was a forbidding place. Layers of peaks stretched back as far as the eye could see like a great army waiting the call to march. Ice mist glittered from the crags and drifted into the air and it would have been easy for anyone of a superstitious nature to suspect the island of being some kind of rocky anteroom to eternity, an in-between world where discarded spirits and the souls of never-born children curled up from the high peaks like mist and real life was just a dimming dream.

McGrath is exceptionally eloquent when describing the deprivation and terror experienced by the Inuit during that first harrowing winter on Ellesmere Island:

On 15 October 1953, the sun set over Ellesmere Island for the last time that year. For the next four months the Inuit would be living in perpetual darkness. On good days, when the clouds were drawn back, the sea ice reflected the moon’s glow and so long as the Inuit were out on the ice, they could see their footprints. On bad days, and most days were bad days, they could not tell what was beneath or above or around them, nor in which direction they were travelling or even when their journey, however short, might end. The Inuit of Inukjuak had no word for the void that opened up around them. At first, they tried to carry on with the routine they had worked so hard to establish while there was still light….But the dark exhausted them and pretty soon it was almost impossible to maintain a routine. Their body clocks broke down and the brain could not tell whether it was day or night or something in between. The absence of light made hunting an almost daily terror. Though they could no longer see it, the constant creaking and cracking of the ice reminded them that they were surrounded. The ice around the Lindstrom Peninsula often broke open without warning and floes were blown away on the high winds. Rime frost and beached ice collected at the shore and right at the sea’s edge the smooth spread of the ancient ice foot gave way to rough ice rubble and pressure ridges. The hunters had not had time to learn the position of all the contradictory currents and eddies in the sound before the dark came down, and they did not know where the ice was at its most unstable. Around the cracks there were patches of rotting ice and, beyond these, smooth fields of the open sea ice interrupted by immense, embedded icebergs.

Later, when a new family arrives, they must endure the same awful privations:

After a few days, the Flahertys discovered that their internal clocks had broken, waking them at all hours and disturbing their sleep. In the dark, everything seemed at the same time simpler and more complex. Objects became silhouettes whose sharp outlines obscured detail. Their own fingers dissolved into tentacles floating in a sea of contradictory impressions. Adults felt shorter, children taller, eyelashes felt thicker, noses more fleshy. The others, who had gone through it all before, attempted to reassure them, but there were so many bewildering new sensations that it was impossible to feel comforted.

It was decades before the injury done to these people was acknowledged by the government of Canada. Redress for these wrongs was obtained by the formation of a new legislative entity: Nunavut, created on April 1, 1999. Nunavut means “Our Land” in the Inuktitut language. At 787,155 square miles, it comprises one fifth of Canada’s land mass and is the fifth largest country subdivision in the world.

The government made further reparations by establishing a fund containing ten million Canadian dollars, the purpose of which was “…to provide housing, travel, pensions and compensation for the sixteen families who were relocated to the High Arctic in 1953 and 1955 and their descendants.” McGrath adds that there were calls for the government to issue an official apology to those whose lives were blighted, and in some cases lost, due to the Arctic relocation. At the time of her writing, however, no such gesture had been forthcoming. (The Long Exile was published in 2006.)

For more information, see the Wikipedia entry.   There is also now a tourism initiative for Nunavut.

The story of the Inuit of Inukjuak and their forcible removal to Ellesmere Island is one of suffering, endurance, and ultimately, vindication and triumph. It is told with compassion and conviction by Melanie McGrath. The reviewers in both Booklist and Publishers Weekly used the word “riveting” to describe  this narrative. The Long Exile is a masterful recounting of a story that needed to be told. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Melanie McGrath

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Nunavut scenes

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