Creative Crimes

In her seminal work The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm launched a scandal with her famous opening sentence: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”

Malcolm’s 1989 essay is a withering look at an otherwise-forgotten true-crime book. She claims that as he did his research, the journalist groomed the murderer, Jeffrey MacDonald, by leading him to believe the book would exonerate him. In fact, the journalist thought MacDonald was guilty, and used his quotes against him. MacDonald felt betrayed and sued.

Malcolm was questioning the morality of journalists who took advantage of their subjects. Yet it later emerged that, several years before publishing her book, Malcolm had herself been sued by Jeffrey Mousaieff Masson, a psychoanalyst she had profiled in The New Yorker. Masson claimed that Malcolm had misquoted and defamed him by saying he had called himself “an intellectual gigolo.” He lost his case, but that only makes it more fascinating to see Malcolm calling work done by journalists like herself “morally indefensible.” Especially when both the murderer and the psychoanalyst are named Jeffrey.

The complex world of subject and objectifier, this Wonderland of user and used, is the thematic playground for Claire Messud’s angry new novel, The Woman Upstairs. In Messud’s case, the focus is visual art, its subject the relationship of a naive weekend artist to the compelling woman who takes her as a studio mate. This sharp-eyed book explores the relationship, step by step, as it enters the realm of complicity. Is the more established artist justified in making use of the naive weekender who offers herself so freely? And how does it feel once you realize you have been used?

For Nora Eldridge, the answer is a howl. Nora is a former art student and failed New York artist who, as the novel opens, has retreated to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she teaches grade 3. Our narrator, Nora, defines herself at 42 as one of those quiet, single, upstairs neighbours whom everybody likes and nobody seems to remember. At night and on weekends, she still makes art in the second bedroom of her apartment, but not even Nora takes her shadow boxes seriously.

Into this constrained life comes a charming little boy. Reza Shahid, a new arrival in Nora’s classroom, is soon followed by his equally charming mother, the symbolically named Sirena. Sirena is an Italian artist teetering on the edge of a big career, in town because her Lebanese husband, an academic star named Skandar, is spending the year at Harvard. We quickly learn that Nora falls in love with all three, and that they end up betraying her. On the first page, Nora’s cry: “FUCK THEM ALL.”

In her four previous books, Messud has often written about peripatetic, deracinated characters. Ukraine, west-end Toronto, London, the south of France, Algeria and, in her 2005 bestseller, The Emperor’s Children, Manhattan: Messud’s people are at once at home and lost in a series of precisely observed locales, often during the great moments of history.

Messud was born in the United States, educated at Yale and now lives outside Boston with her husband, the critic James Wood, and their children. Her mother is Canadian and she spent her early years in Toronto; her father is Algerian French; and she went to Cambridge University. Perhaps it is this outsider’s perspective that keeps her more alive to the unsettled, mongrel nature of the world than many American writers and makes her such a precise observer of class. I would like to ban U.S. writers from defining their characters by saying they went to Smith or Brown or Yale, which many seem to think says it all. Messud understands the importance of unimportant things—a tattered photograph of a port, a bride’s dress of sea-foam blue—and reliably says more.

The Woman Upstairs is a departure from Messud’s earlier work, its concerns narrower, if no less significant, and its narrative more compressed. Told after the fact by a furious Nora, it documents her transition from having a degree of power over the Shahids—she begins as Reza’s teacher, after all—to putting herself at their service.

Shortly after they meet, Sirena invites Nora to share a studio. They end up working in separate corners of a warehouse atelier, Sirena growing preoccupied with her large-scale conceptual work, a so-called Wonderland of lava flows, aspirin flowers and video cameras. To my taste, it sounds less interesting than the Joseph Cornell–like boxes that Nora assembles nearby, although that might be part of Messud’s point, and, in any case, it is irrelevant. Sirena does the type of work curators love these days, has international contacts and, most importantly, possesses an artist’s self- doubting, never-doubting, entirely believable self-confidence.

Sirena’s confidence energizes Nora. She works on her boxes with renewed vigour, eventually embarking upon a series of seductive night-time walks with Sirena’s husband, Skandar, who is lonely, and whose loneliness—Nora knows this— the busy Sirena is glad Nora can assuage. It is a subtle tripartite relationship, hugely important to Nora, but not unimportant to the Shahids and, initially at least, not unequal.

The tipping point comes when Nora happily agrees to become Reza’s part-time babysitter, plummeting in caste from professional teacher to unpaid servant. I closed the book, thinking of the time I was a newly hired 23-year-old chase producer on CBC Radio’s As It Happens and host Barbara Frum asked me to call the groomers about her dog, subtly testing the waters to see if I would agree to become her unofficial part-time personal assistant. I was both too stupid and too smart to agree, and after I pretended not to hear, she pretended I was not 23 and stupid, and went on to teach me everything about doing interviews.

But Nora becomes a personal assistant, making herself useful to the Shahids, a dogsbody rather than an equal, and her slide begins. She helps Sirena with her art while neglecting her own, goes a tantalizing distance when Skandar calls and fantasizes Reza as her son. The book is a mystery: what does Sirena end up doing to make Nora feel so betrayed? The mystery is heightened when we learn that after leaving Cambridge, Sirena has become an internationally renowned artist. Whose work, when Nora sees it, makes her faint.

The novel is not without flaws. In all her books, Messud has a tendency to create secondary characters whose sole purpose seems to be to move the story forward or underline themes—in this case, Nora’s two lesbian friends. Like her other convenient characters, they do nothing inconvenient to the plot, and therefore fail to come alive. This novel, Messud’s tightest, could have been even tighter and lost nothing by it.

Yet overall, The Woman Upstairs is an intelligent, uncompromising book, thought provoking and sexy. It is also sly. At the end, Nora plans to use her experience of being used, and we find ourselves looking down a hall of mirrors.

Perhaps this novel is itself a mirror. I cannot help wondering if Messud has felt used and bruised by another writer, or whether she has been provoked into taking a walk in the shoes of someone who felt used by her. Whatever the reason, Nora’s howl of pain echoes loudly, like the door that Nora Helmer slams at the end of A Doll’s House, or like the reverberating yes at the end of Ulysses that James Joyce famously stole from his wife, Nora Barnacle.

Questions crowd in, and, in the end, I put the book down another time to wonder.