Claire Messud to Publishers Weekly: “What kind of question is that?”

Wed, 01 May 2013 14:47:00 +0000

In Salon this week, Laura Miller raved that Claire Messud's new novel, "The Woman Upstairs," is "claustrophobically hypnotic" and "a ferocious portrait of creative and spiritual frustration."

The author's feeling some of that frustration as well, with reductive media questions about the likability of her main character -- a question that might not be posed to a male author in quite this way -- as this new interview with Publishers Weekly shows:

“The Woman Upstairs”: Rage of a frustrated artist

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 22:00:00 +0000

As Nora Eldridge, the narrator of Claire Messud's claustrophobically hypnotic new novel would have it, we are all of us surrounded by reservoirs of invisible rage. "The Woman Upstairs" purports to be the story of one of the ragers, although Nora both does and doesn't wish to be identified with the archetypal figure in the novel's title. The counterpart to Dostoyevsky's Underground Man, the Woman Upstairs, in Nora's formulation, is a recessive, barely noticed neighbor, "whose trash is always tidy, who smiles brightly in the stairwell with a cheerful greeting, and who, from behind closed doors, never makes a sound." Her "day's great excitement is the arrival of the Garnet Hill catalog." She strives not to cause any inconvenience and is resigned to always coming second (or third) in other people's lives,

A ferocious portrait of creative and spiritual frustration, "The Woman Upstairs" begins by linking Nora's fury to her gender, a connection reinforced by the name she shares with the heroine of Ibsen's "A Doll's House." "It was supposed to say 'Great Artist' on my tombstone," she explains, "but if I died right now it would say 'such a good teacher/daughter/friend' instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL. Don't all women feel the same?"

Salon.com > Claire Messud

Claire Messud to Publishers Weekly: “What kind of question is that?”

“The Woman Upstairs”: Rage of a frustrated artist