**Spoiler Alert**
There is a point in this novel, somewhere three quarters of the way through, where you wonder whether Ms. Messud hasn’t maybe lost her mind a little. What is the point of all this one sided lust for another family? Both the individuals and the collective whole. But if you wait for it, it comes in the final pages. And it is brilliant.
With the opening, “Do you want to know how angry I am? Nobody wants to know that.”—we’re onto a really honest, open piece about the fury and the emotions that no one wants to ever discuss. That remain taboo in society even to this day. The relationships that aren’t taken seriously, the disloyalties of our friends and family, the one-sidedness, the emptiness.
Messud’s creation of Nora Eldridge is a little bit genius because she’s not a particular misfit, she’s not a sociopath or a closet addict of some kind. She’s not a mental case or a wack. She’s far more typical—a school teacher, a daughter, a steadfast friend who just happened to have never been married. The woman upstairs. The one who is solid, with her cat and her cardigan who doesn’t make any noise on the weekends. But silently, she seethes. She is painfully observant of people around her, their moors, their neediness of others. She is resilient in her independence and her character, yet finds herself helplessly drawn to the members of another family who suddenly pop energy and purpose into her life when their son, her student, is attacked by playground bullies. His parents are exotic, from Italy and Beirut, captivating Nora her for all the things that she is not. She falls in love with each member of the Shahid family for different reasons, and destroys her sense of self-worth, her confidence and perceptions of others, in the process.
In the end, The Woman Upstairs is about the way in which a relationship means many different things to the people in it. It gives and takes in different ways, and it can ruin or empower a person’s life. You’ll be pleased to see what Nora does with the aftermath of her relationship with the Shahids. The Chicago Literati thinks so too.
