The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud

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

What woman isn’t pissed off? This is one of the questions that opens the book, and Messud does a good job illustrating some of the reasons why every woman should be furious sometimes. Yet this novel isn’t every woman’s story, nor is it an angry diatribe.

It is one woman’s story. The Woman Upstairs is 42-year-old Nora Eldridge, elementary school teacher, quintessential “good girl”, frustrated want-to-be artist, and desperately lonesome woman. The story is told specifically, precisely, and intelligently, and it explores big thematic questions that every person should think about: What is love? What is art? What is sexuality? What happens to a life when one’s dreams don’t come true? And why should it take anger to trigger those dreams?

Set in a small town just north of Boston, one day Nora drops a bag of apples in Whole Foods. The next day she begins to fall in love–with an entire family. The forbidden fruit looms large.

Nora tells the story in the first-person, and she doles out the details of this pivotal school year, when she becomes intimately involved with Skandar, famous Lebanese historian and academic father; Sirena, soon-to-be-famous artist and mother; and Reza, their beautiful, charming child. Much of the novel involves Nora sorting out her emotions and interacting with these three characters, and the overarching question that the first-person narration creates is: “Why is this woman so angry?” Because many of the events and much of the year is mundane, it’s a testament to the author’s skill that the overarching question propels the read to the very end. The question acts as a kind of mystery, because although anyone can relate to Nora, at times the reader has to question her emotional wisdom, right up to the very last line of the book. Yet through each character that Nora’s sad and hungry eyes see, Messud guides us to explore the perils and triumphs of love, life, and art.

“Sirena wasn’t like me, constrained by reality, by what actually was or had been. She took on storybook worlds, plundering other peoples’ imaginations but not their histories. Maybe it was what made her, what makes her—a real artist in the eyes of the world, whereas I count as a spinster with a hobby…Sirena, on the other hand, is engaged with the life force. We all want that, really. It’s what attracts us: someone who opens doors to possibility, to the barely imagined. Someone who embraces the colors and textures, the tastes and transformations—someone who embraces, period.”

Above all, this is a story that embraces and that can be embraced. It is a novel that is art, written by a “real artist”, and it may just make you think, question, and imagine, even after you close the book.

Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings

“Slowly, the movement away from the creative, and toward the creativity of money, was becoming increasingly visible.”

The setting: New York City. Where else?

Meg Wolitzer’s novel chronicles the lives of a group of friends from their precocious adolescence to their late middle age, focusing on the dynamics of friendship–and the dynamics of talent and money.

Wolitzer has four previous novels to her name, and The Interestings, released in hardcover in April of this year, weighs in at a hefty 486 pages and carries a blurb by Jeffrey Eugenides. He compares Wolitzer to Virginia Woolf in The Waves, so I paid attention. Four weeks after beginning the book, I’m still paying attention.

The Interestings is  an example of skilled story telling, it explores interesting themes, and the characters are so fully rendered that it feels as if you know these people. The novel is constructed soundly and smartly.

It didn’t take me nearly a month to read The Interestings, however, because I was so interested in it. Rather, the characters on the page were so real, I tired of listening in on their lives every night, and I didn’t feel a strong emotional connection to any of them; however, the key themes of the book do make it worth reading, and I know others who have read the book in a weekend and found it captivating.  Here’s how the book works:

The story opens at a summer camp for elite teenagers interested in the arts in 1974. Jules, the scholarship kid from the ‘burbs, is the main protagonist of the story, and, through her, Wolitzer explores how talent, luck, and money change everything. In short, Jules doesn’t have enough of any of those things.

Jules’ friends Ash & Ethan, however, have each of those things in big supply. Ash is the tall, lithe, beautiful daughter of a Park Avenue financier interested in feminist theater. Ethan is the homely son of a broken family, who makes up for his background by creating a brilliant world of animation that will change American entertainment.

There is also a host of peripheral characters. Jonah, the gay son of a famous folk singer, comes of age during the time that AIDS was a death sentence. Yet it was the damage he faced as a child at the hands of careless adults that caused the real harm. The damage done to children is another big theme of this book, however Wolitzer uses a light touch, and each character will face their own personal tragedies, big and small. Money and talent affects those tragedies. It is friendship, however, that plays the role of the hero in this book. For this reason alone, the book is worth reading.

“Ethan and Ash don’t need kebab specials in their lives anymore. What I really mean is, they don’t need us. If we all met now, we would never become friends. You think they would feel a connection if someone said, ‘Here is a very nice social worker and a very nice ultrasound technician?’”

Or would they feel that connection? The characters beliefs and statements aren’t always correct, and watching each of them help each other to evolve, heal, and understand their lives is rewarding. The book is a wise meditation on the true beauty of friendship.

Wolitzer alludes to key moments in the lives of the characters and the story, and she deftly tacks forward in time and then circles back to delve into the scenes. The novel is divided into three parts, and as it opens at summer camp, so too will it close there. Along the way, it visits interesting corners of New York City’s history, when the city could have gone in one direction or another–to stay a dangerous, crime filled place filled with creative energy, or to become the corporate city-state it is today, a place filled with the wealthy, where creativity has become a commodity. Or is there more to it?

“But what made life in New York odd—not better, and in fact probably worse—was the impression of wealth seeping through everything. New high-end restaurants kept opening; one of them featured lavender in every dish…’In the past, people appreciated artwork. Now artwork appreciates?”

And this is a book to appreciate for the questions it asks. What is true friendship? What role does it play in our lives? Is it better to have a little bit of talent or none at all? Can you ask the same question about money? Or is “better” not the correct word?

Bad things happen, and how we respond to them is not necessarily good, bad, or better. The world changes, and that’s not necessarily good or bad, either. In The Interestings, despite money and genes, all of the characters face the hardest of life’s moments, and we watch them evolve along with the world around them, which is what makes The Interestings an interesting read.