Highbrow Magazine - novels https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/novels en Tracking Down a Killer in Jane Smiley’s ‘A Dangerous Business’ https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/23473-tracking-down-killer-jane-smiley-s-dangerous-business <div class="field field-name-field-cat field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/books-fiction" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Books &amp; Fiction</a></div></div></div><span class="submitted-by">Submitted by tara on Tue, 03/14/2023 - 14:46</span><div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="og:image rdfs:seeAlso" resource="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/1smileybook.jpg?itok=HdN7cORn"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/1smileybook.jpg?itok=HdN7cORn" width="480" height="318" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p> </p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif"><strong>A Dangerous Business</strong></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif"><strong>By Jane Smiley</strong></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif"><strong>Knopf</strong></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif"><strong>224 pages</strong></span></span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">Monterey, California, 1851. Two women, Eliza Ripple and Jean MacPherson, work in different brothels in the city, at some personal risk (“being a woman is a dangerous business,” as one madam, Mrs. Parks, puts it). The perils of life as a prostitute in California’s gold-rush era become alarmingly clear as, one by one, the bodies of murdered sex workers are found in the area. </span></span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">Jane Smiley, a prolific author and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, <em>A Thousand Acres</em>, is certainly eclectic in her chosen subject matter. She has ventured far and wide in her fiction, from the wilds of 14<sup>th</sup>-century Greenland<strong> </strong>(<em>The Greenlanders</em>) to the “wilds” of academia (<em>Moo</em>) and the intrigues of horse racing (<em>Horse Heaven</em>).  </span></span></p> <p> </p> <p><img alt="" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/2smileybook.jpg" style="height:435px; width:652px" typeof="foaf:Image" /></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">Smiley’s new novel, <em>A Dangerous Business</em>, is no exception to her wide-ranging interests, though the result seems a lesser addition to her oeuvre.  </span></span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">For one thing, there’s a lot of exposition in the opening pages. We learn about Eliza’s late husband, Peter, and how his violent death led her to work in a house of ill repute. We meet several of her clients, men from all walks of life in this frontier outpost. Later, Eliza and Jean undertake their own amateur scrutiny into the killings—aided by a reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and the investigatory techniques of C. Auguste Dupin, its legendary detective. </span></span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">The ensuing action, however, takes a long time in coming. At one point, these female sleuths go for a buggy ride around the Monterey peninsula:</span></span></p> <p> </p> <p><img alt="" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/3smileybook.jpg" style="height:416px; width:650px" typeof="foaf:Image" /></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">“First, they went past the dock and headed up along the bay. Eliza was on the left side, and enjoyed looking out at the curving, pale beaches with the waves of the bay simply lapping, not crashing. The water was blue as blue, since the sun shone from behind the hills. The dunes were interesting, too; Eliza had never seen a dune, though she had heard of them. There were four ships visible in the bay, one apparently heading toward the docks, two heading away from the docks, and one moored, for some reason, perhaps a quarter of a mile out in the water—the sails of that one were down, and Eliza could make out some figures standing on the bow, looking toward the docks.” </span></span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">While this is evocative of the region, the slackness in some of the phrasing (“water as blue as blue” and “The dunes were interesting” and repeated use of “docks” and “heading”) suggests a lackluster prose that’s unfortunately evident throughout. The novel’s pacing suffers, again due to the leaden exposition. </span></span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">Scenes with Eliza at her job are rendered in oddly understated language as well. Her interactions with the roughshod clientele seem not especially risky, a bit surprising given the ruffian behavior of the times. </span></span></p> <p> </p> <p><img alt="" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/4smileybook.jpg" style="height:600px; width:392px" typeof="foaf:Image" /></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">In the end, the mystery behind the serial killings is resolved, but only after Eliza and Jean have taken many long walks and buggy rides, in pursuit of inconclusive leads. </span></span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">For some readers, <em>A Dangerous Business </em>may fall short of expectations. Uneasily blending historical and crime fiction, Jane Smiley’s novel lacks the urgency of her previous work, and its chief protagonist, Eliza Ripple, isn’t compelling enough to carry the story on her own. </span></span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif"><strong>Author Bio:</strong></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif"><strong><em>Lee Polevoi</em>, Highbrow Magazine’s <em>chief book critic, is the author of a new novel, </em></strong><a href="https://www.lpconfessions.com/" style="color:#0563c1; text-decoration:underline"><strong>The Confessions of Gabriel Ash</strong></a><strong><em>, coming in May. </em></strong></span></span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif"><strong>For Highbrow Magazine</strong></span></span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif"><strong>Image Sources:</strong></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif"><em>--PublicDomainPictures (<a href="https://pixabay.com/photos/knife-stabbing-stab-kill-murder-316655/" style="color:#0563c1; text-decoration:underline">Pixabay</a>, Creative Commons)</em></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif"><em>--Judith Scharnowski (<a href="https://pixabay.com/photos/monterey-ocean-california-norcal-1571091/" style="color:#0563c1; text-decoration:underline">Pixabay</a>, Creative Commons)</em></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif"><em>--GDJ (<a href="https://pixabay.com/vectors/woman-carriage-travel-vehicle-7443757/" style="color:#0563c1; text-decoration:underline">Pixabay</a>, Creative Commons)</em></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif"><em>--Knopf</em></span></span></p> <p> </p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/jane-smiley" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jane Smiley</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/dangerous-business" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">A Dangerous Business</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/new-books" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">new books</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/new-fiction" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">new fiction</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/murder-mysteries" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">murder mysteries</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/novels" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">novels</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/gold-rush-era" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">gold rush era</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Lee Polevoi</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-pop field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Popular:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">not popular</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-bot field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Bottom Slider:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Out Slider</div></div></div> Tue, 14 Mar 2023 18:46:12 +0000 tara 11733 at https://www.highbrowmagazine.com https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/23473-tracking-down-killer-jane-smiley-s-dangerous-business#comments Environmental Collapse and the Future of the Planet Hang in the Balance in ‘Orphans of Canland’ https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/21924-environmental-collapse-and-future-planet-hang-balance-orphans-canland <div class="field field-name-field-cat field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/books-fiction" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Books &amp; Fiction</a></div></div></div><span class="submitted-by">Submitted by tara on Tue, 11/08/2022 - 16:09</span><div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="og:image rdfs:seeAlso" resource="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/1orphansbook.jpg?itok=u_3lryCV"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/1orphansbook.jpg?itok=u_3lryCV" width="480" height="245" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p> </p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">It’s sunny, the sky’s vibrating like it can’t wait, and AB’s face is split with laughter. Then the clouds move in and AB’s laughter turns to shaking worry. The yellow light turns white and AB starts to cry. Their tears become rain. The light dies. I put my face to theirs so they’re all I see. Their face is pressed against mine, and they’re calm like a baby. I try to speak, to apologize, but I have no voice. They start to pull away, their face happy, then unhappy. So I wake up. It’s like something has slipped from my grasp, a word I can’t recall.</span></span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">I get up. I put on two pairs of socks and two wool sweaters and pop my teeth in and then without thinking, walk through the near-total darkness to my door, somehow not knocking anything over. I have no idea what time it is. The whole house is dark, but the path from the hall to the front door is easy because there’s nothing in the way. </span></span></p> <p><img alt="" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/2orphansbook.jpg" style="height:572px; width:371px" typeof="foaf:Image" /></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">It’s strange—walking through our house, without entering his room, you’d never know that Dylan lived here. There are no shoes by the door, no book on the couch, no uncleared plate on the table. We once shared my room, when Michael used Dylan’s current room exclusively as his office. Dylan and I slept in separate beds against opposite walls, and he’d talk to me until I fell asleep, asking me what I liked and thought and wanted, and telling me that one day he would invent a new species of plant through cross-pollination and genetic modification that needs no water and grows quickly and is edible to humans and poisonous to vermin, and makes Canland’s ecosystem utterly incorruptible. When he got kicked out of school, and Michael started teaching him, Dylan spent all his time in what’s now his room, and he never slept in mine again.</span></span></p> <p><img alt="" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/3orphansbook.jpg" style="height:488px; width:650px" typeof="foaf:Image" /></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">It’s cold out, as usual, in the desert night. I sit on the front step. I rarely go outside after dark. The sky’s full of stars that make visible silhouettes of everything—the tall, tall eucalyptus trees across the road, showing night between their leaves, soughing in a light wind that, before the trees were here to cut it up, howled tempestuously; the jagged sierras, sculptures made by ice and heat and unthinkable pressure, like stacked bones of beasts buried in the Earth; and above those peaks, a full huge pale stony moon hangs like a clock, in perpetual motion relative to us so it only ever shows one face to the Earth, a likelihood so infinitesimal that I wonder for a moment, as Michael might, who placed it there just so. Maybe scientific singularity is an argument for god, and that’s why ancient civilizations worshipped the cosmos.</span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif"><img alt="https://ssl.gstatic.com/ui/v1/icons/mail/images/cleardot.gif" src="https://ssl.gstatic.com/ui/v1/icons/mail/images/cleardot.gif" style="height:1px; width:1px" /></span></span><img alt="" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/4orphansbook.jpg" style="height:650px; width:488px" typeof="foaf:Image" /></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif"><strong>This is an excerpt from Daniel Vitale’s new book, <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Orphans-Canland-Daniel-Vitale/dp/B0B993MYH8/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1QP7VLN5IYLMA&amp;keywords=orphans+of+canland&amp;qid=1667938477&amp;sprefix=orphans+of+canland%2Caps%2C104&amp;sr=8-1" style="color:#0563c1; text-decoration:underline">Orphans of Canland</a> (Strij Publishing)</em>. It’s published here with permission.</strong></span></span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif"><strong>Highbrow Magazine                                                                                        </strong></span></span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif"><strong>Image Sources:      </strong></span></span></p> <p><em><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">--the Author        </span></span></em></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif"><em>--Strij Publishing</em></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif"><em>--Bitmatrix (<a href="https://pixabay.com/photos/desert-drought-dry-sand-2111781/" style="color:#0563c1; text-decoration:underline">Pixabay</a>, Creative Commons)</em></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif"><em>--Foto Rabe (<a href="https://pixabay.com/photos/industry-sunrise-fog-germany-611668/" style="color:#0563c1; text-decoration:underline">Pixabay</a>, Creative Commons)</em></span></span></p> <p> </p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/daniel-vitale" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">daniel vitale</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/orphans-canland" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">orphans of canland</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/new-fiction" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">new fiction</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/enviornment" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">enviornment</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/environmental-collapse" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">environmental collapse</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/dystopian-novels" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">dystopian novels</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/science-fiction" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">science fiction</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">literature</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/new-books" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">new books</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/novels" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">novels</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Daniel Vitale</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-pop field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Popular:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">not popular</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-bot field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Bottom Slider:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">In Slider</div></div></div> Tue, 08 Nov 2022 21:09:09 +0000 tara 11443 at https://www.highbrowmagazine.com https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/21924-environmental-collapse-and-future-planet-hang-balance-orphans-canland#comments A Father’s Quest to Save His Son in Trevor J. Houser’s New Book https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/19340-father-s-quest-save-his-son-trevor-j-houser-s-new-book <div class="field field-name-field-cat field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/books-fiction" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Books &amp; Fiction</a></div></div></div><span class="submitted-by">Submitted by tara on Mon, 02/21/2022 - 17:35</span><div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="og:image rdfs:seeAlso" resource="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/1hospital_vidal_balielo_jr-pexels.jpg?itok=biwR7auZ"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/1hospital_vidal_balielo_jr-pexels.jpg?itok=biwR7auZ" width="480" height="320" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p> </p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">AFTER MY SON’S last surgery, we thought he’d gone blind. “A complication,” said the doctors. Anyway, he couldn’t see, so I handed him a Hot Wheels car and we both played Hot Wheels on his hospital bed, using the creases and folds like jumping ramps. </span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">He kept blinking and trying to see and making the sounds of a car jumping over massive canyons of stiff blue cotton that said, “St. Luke’s.” My wife was crying, piled up somewhere near the air conditioner. I think maybe there was a nurse. It was nighttime outside in New York City. The window was cracked to let in the fresh air. You could hear taxi cabs and a bar playing jazz somewhere. It was late summer. My son had suction cups and wires sticking out all over him like a billboard for death. He probably wasn’t even the sickest person in this hospital, I thought, as we jumped our cars from one of his little knees to mine. Other children might’ve actually died in there that day. Their tiny hearts and lungs failed somewhere windowless and cold, and never got to play Hot Wheels one last time with their father, hearing faraway jazz on a summer evening. </span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">After a couple hours, my son began to regain his eyesight, but I remember thinking at the time he might be blind for life. He just kept playing cars, though, so I did, too. </span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">He reminds me of myself in a lot of ways, although I come from a heart-diseased people. </span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">In the winter of 1980, my grandfather died of a heart attack and I ran away from home with three cans of tomato soup. I lived in a thatch of bamboo in the neighbor’s yard. A few hours later my parents found me and took me home. They fed me some of the tomato soup with saltine crackers and a chocolate square for dessert. </span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">“How do you feel now?” they asked. </span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">“Good,” I lied, feeling hollow, and thinking about death more than ever. </span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">As my father got ready for work the next morning, I alerted him to the presence of a six-foot albino witch who, at the time, I was certain lived on a branch outside my bedroom window. </span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">“She wants to pull my guts out,” I told him. </span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">“Oh yeah,” my father said, shaving in his black socks and tighty-whities.  “What’s the old gal’s name?” </span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">“I don’t know,” I said, “but I think she wants to eat my guts while I’m still alive.” </span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">“It’s alright kiddo.” He patted my head. “No more scary movies for awhile, OK?” </span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">He went back to shaving. He owned a private security company and years later also died of heart failure while looking at magazines in the Denver airport. </span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">While he shaved, I went inside a closet behind some old smelly coats and cried. I was crying because one day my father would be in the ground with grandpa, and the albino witch would be eating my guts while I was still alive. Once I even tried talking to grandpa through the floor heater, but he couldn’t hear me because of all the dirt in his ears. Then I got older and worried more about the imperviousness of bra straps which begat mortgages which begat interventional radiologists on 99th and Madison. </span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">I didn’t have time for six-foot albino witches and speaking to the dead.</span></span></p> <p> </p> <p><img alt="" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/1pacificbook.jpg" style="height:600px; width:390px" typeof="foaf:Image" /></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">********************</span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">WHEN I WAS nine, I went camping with my father near Mt. Hood. One evening while getting fresh Cherry Cokes from a nearby mountain stream, he saw a bald eagle preening atop a halfcarbonized tree. </span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">“F**k bald eagles,” my father said. </span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">I laughed. </span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">“F**k bald eagles,” he said, gathering up the Cokes and karate kicking a tree, feeling excited about using the word “f**k” in front of his son. </span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">Later my father put on a gray sweater. We ate chili by a fire. We talked about baseball. My father smiled. He was growing a beard. One day he would be smiling in the Denver Airport of Death, but today he was smiling under normal non-death conditions; breathing without making fearful choking faces, with his bowl of chili, and his facial hair, that together signified peerless health and stability or something like stability. </span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif">My father’s stability made me proud. I wanted to be like him and Steve McQueen from <em>Bullit</em>. I wanted to wear dark blue turtlenecks and give a hard-ass look at some D.A. who was trying to screw me over and just walk away, even though I could probably knock him out with one punch if I wanted. My life should be like that, my nine-year old self thought. Eat fresh fruit off of beautiful women. Write long, thoughtful letters to my mother. Drive sports cars in the dazzling sunlight of Monaco, laughing.</span></span></p> <p> </p> <p><img alt="" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/1fatherandson_mehmet_ali_gokci-pexels.jpg" style="height:400px; width:600px" typeof="foaf:Image" /></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif"><strong>This is an excerpt from <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Pacific-Trevor-J-Houser/dp/1950730840/ref=sr_1_1?crid=FV7LNS7NYQN3&amp;keywords=trevor+j.+houser&amp;qid=1645482668&amp;sprefix=trevor+j.+houser%2Caps%2C59&amp;sr=8-1" style="color:#0563c1; text-decoration:underline">Pacific</a></em> by Trevor J. Houser. It’s printed here with permission.</strong></span></span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif"><strong>Highbrow Magazine</strong></span></span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif"><strong>Image Sources:</strong></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif"><em>--Unsolicited Press</em></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif"><em>--Vidal Balielo Jr. (<a href="https://www.pexels.com/photo/two-person-doing-surgery-inside-room-1250655/" style="color:#0563c1; text-decoration:underline">Pexels</a>, Creative Commons)</em></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:18px"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif"><em>--Mehmet Ali Gokci (<a href="https://www.pexels.com/photo/sea-dawn-landscape-sunset-7474904/" style="color:#0563c1; text-decoration:underline">Pexels</a>, Creative Commons)</em></span></span></p> <p> </p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/trevor-j-houser" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Trevor J. Houser</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/pacific" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">pacific</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/new-ficition" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">new ficition</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/new-books" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">new books</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/father-and-son" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">father and son</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/father-and-son-stories" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">father and son stories</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/novels" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">novels</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/family-stories" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">family stories</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/parents-and-children" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">parents and children</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Trevor J. Houser</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-pop field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Popular:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">not popular</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-bot field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Bottom Slider:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">In Slider</div></div></div> Mon, 21 Feb 2022 22:35:56 +0000 tara 10944 at https://www.highbrowmagazine.com https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/19340-father-s-quest-save-his-son-trevor-j-houser-s-new-book#comments A Writer’s Rage: Reading Claire Messud’s ‘The Woman Upstairs’ https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/2667-writer-s-rage-reading-claire-messud-s-woman-upstairs <div class="field field-name-field-cat field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/books-fiction" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Books &amp; Fiction</a></div></div></div><span class="submitted-by">Submitted by tara on Fri, 08/02/2013 - 10:07</span><div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="og:image rdfs:seeAlso" resource="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/1messud.jpg?itok=i6xOrVEC"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/1messud.jpg?itok=i6xOrVEC" width="322" height="480" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>  </p> <p> Nora Eldridge is a “good girl,” and finally as she approaches, and then passes, the middling age of 40, she is angry. A self-aware narrator, even while she slips into the murky borderland of desire—desire as urgent need, a driving force with the power to actualize dreams, or desire as fantasy, and possibly delusion—Nora educates the reader on the choices and confines of being a woman, one who learns “a whole other polite way of speaking to the people who mustn’t see you clearly. …It doesn’t ever occur to you, as you fashion your mask so carefully, that it will grow into your skin and graft itself, come to seem irremovable.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> But Nora has had dreams, of being a great artist, which she ceded for more practical activities: teaching third graders and helping her father care for her ailing mother. At age 37, Nora, still single herself, becomes acquainted with the three members of a family, in Boston from Paris for the year, the Shahids: eight-year-old Reza, “this luminous boy,” “his cheeks with their faint rosy tinge, the wildness of his black hair and eyebrows and lashes, the amused intensity of those mottled gray eyes”; Sirena, Reza’s mother, the exotic and confident, if sometimes distracted or aloof, Italian artist; and Skandar, Reza’s father, a thoughtful scholar from Lebanon, engaged as a visiting professor at Harvard, whom Messud gives an air of quiet containment, even with his steady stream of stories and historical analysis, the sort of wisdoms and interesting remarks readers of Messud, author of three previous novels (<a href="http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-9645611-0-6"><em>When The World Was Steady</em></a>, <a href="http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-15-100471-3"><em>The Last Life</em></a>, the bestselling <a href="http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-307-26419-0"><em>The Emperor’s Children</em></a>) and a pair of novellas (<a href="http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-15-100588-8"><em>The Hunters</em></a>), have come to expect.</p> <p> Nora, through the course of much of the novel, is in thrall to each of these characters. They serve as distraction from her mother’s recent death; but even more, they invite Nora to live, to reclaim squelched dreams and intentions. “[M]y dream in my head of being an artist, and my dream in the world of being an artist, I couldn’t—until Sirena, I couldn’t—connect them.” But then Nora frets, “As was so often the case—we Women Upstairs!—[Sirena’s] life would be shown to be more important than my life.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> Herein we have the overt source of Nora’s pulsing rage—a betrayal, revealed at novel’s end, but also the constancy of being secondary—the fury which lights up the book’s opening pages: <em>How angry am I? You don’t want to know.</em></p> <p style="margin-left:.7in;"> Don’t all women feel the same? The only difference is how much we know we feel it, how in touch we are with our fury. We’re all furies, except the ones who are too damned foolish, and my worry now is that we’re brainwashing them from the cradle….</p> <p>  </p> <p> <em>The Woman Upstairs</em> is a novel about female experience and about the coexistence of power and powerlessness, metastasized through the tight prism of Nora’s friendship with Sirena (and her husband and son) while sharing an artist’s studio for the year, at Sirena’s behest.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Nora and Sirena might almost be one woman, two parts of one female being, living in a world (our world) rife with contradictions and fraught with self-betrayal. Messud tells Katherine Rowland in an interview for <a href="http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/interior-lives/"><em>Guernica</em></a>, “Each of us makes poor choices sooner or later in one way or another,” adding, on the subject of making art, “it certainly takes some single-minded commitment, whether that’s selfishness or selflessness, I don’t know.” As the novel insists we see, for many women there are too many needs to fulfill—for others.</p> <p>  </p> <p> At an appearance at <a href="http://centerforfiction.org/calendar/claire-messud-the-woman-upstairs/">The Center for Fiction</a> in early May, Messud was asked about the decision to make the central character of Nora single and childless, offering a two-pronged response. In light of Nora’s intense regard for the Shahids and the import she gives them, not entirely reciprocated, Messud suggests that, “When you live in any group situation, you come up against certain reality checks.” Nora’s single status allows her to become more unmoored. Another consideration involved Messud’s “interest in the interior life.” Messud, with two grade-school-age children of her own, joked with earned understanding, “When you have children, you lose your interior life.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> Michael Washburn explains in the May/June issue of <a href="http://www.pw.org/content/the_world_arranged_a_profile_of_claire_messud"><em>Poets &amp; Writers</em></a>, “In addition to the lack of gender parity in the world of letters, Messud found motivation in the soft sexism of daily life that often goes unchallenged.” Washburn presents an email from esteemed literary critic and <em>New Yorker</em> writer, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Wood_%28critic%29">James Wood</a>, Messud’s husband of more than 20 years, which elaborates on this theme:</p> <p style="margin-left:.7in;"> I think Claire has embodied her anxieties about writing, about continuing to write in [<em>The Woman Upstairs</em>], and that Nora’s question is not far removed from questions Claire asks herself often: Why am I making art? ...How does one, as a woman, insert oneself (excuse that verb…) into a tradition still seen as overwhelmingly male? …When Claire and I first met, she was adamant that no serious woman writer could have children, and asked me to look at literary history as evidence…. But of course, we did have children, and there is no doubt that they are at once everything and an enormous obstacle to focused artistic and intellectual achievement; and that this is a more acute question for a woman than for a man, however good and involved a father he is (I am, I am!)</p> <p>  </p> <p> This question of focus—intensity of artistic creation, its pleasures and its possible costs—recurs throughout the novel.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Even while the book is about Nora’s anger, it is “also about a time of joy and discovery and wonder,” <a href="http://centerforfiction.org/calendar/claire-messud-the-woman-upstairs/">Messud</a> affirms, a reawakening of sorts for Nora, as her engagement with each of the Shahids actualizes her, gives her an inner permission and incentive to return with renewed focus to her art. A part of the creative gamble, in visual art and in writing, is that, as <a href="http://centerforfiction.org/calendar/claire-messud-the-woman-upstairs/">Messud</a> puts it, “you are trying to make something that doesn’t exist and nobody cares whether it exists or not.” This necessary focus plays through Nora’s mind and also recurs in Messud’s <a href="http://centerforfiction.org/calendar/claire-messud-the-woman-upstairs/">Center for Fiction</a> discussion of the book, including “the notion of a single-minded obsessive.” Messud points out, “We can all think of single-minded obsessive men—but single-minded obsessive women are freakish and horrible.” Strongly put, and yet the theme of female solicitude towards others that threads through Messud’s interviews this spring, such as the one with novelist David Burr Gerrard in <a href="http://www.tottenvillereview.com/being-nice-is-tiring/">Tottenville Review</a> and appears in several forms in the book, reminds us of how, in <a href="http://centerforfiction.org/calendar/claire-messud-the-woman-upstairs/">Messud’s</a> words, “anger is not acceptable in our culture and it’s particularly unacceptable for women.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> Wood writes in his book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/How-Fiction-Works-James-Wood/dp/0312428472/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1372653111&amp;sr=1-3&amp;keywords=james+wood"><em>How Fiction Works</em></a>: “Dostoevsky was the great analyst—in a sense, almost the inventor—of the psychological category that Nietzsche called <em>ressentiment</em>. Again and again, Dostoevsky shows how pride is really very close to humility, and how hate is very close to a kind of sick love….”</p> <p>  </p> <p> Wood, in explicating a scene within Dostoevsky’s <em>Notes from Underground</em>, describes how</p> <p style="margin-left:.7in;"> …the weaker man loathes but ‘admires’ the officer—and in a sense, loathes him <em>because</em> he admires him. His impotence has less to do with his actual circumstances than with his imaginary relationship to the officer [higher-ranking other], which is one of impotent dependence. Dostoevsky would call this psychological torment the ‘Underground,’ meaning a kind of poisonous, impotent alienation, a chronic instability of self, and a vaunting pride that at any moment might unexpectedly crash into its inverse—cringing self-abasement.</p> <p style="margin-left:.7in;">  </p> <p> Here, we find Nora, expert practitioner of <em>ressentiment</em>, fluctuating between self-abasement and a yearning, fueled by anger, that might yet aid her with “a great boil of rage like the sun’s fire in me—before I die to fu**ing well <em>live</em>.” Nora’s anger, along with the more complicated <em>ressentiment</em>, has proven discomfiting to some readers, whether through recognition or refusal. This unease has been recently cloaked in the reductive ideal of “<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/05/likable_and_unlikable_characters_in_fiction_claire_messud_and_meg_wolitzer.html">likeability</a>,” causing quite a stir in some corridors and rooms, virtual and otherwise, in the world of letters. When <a href="http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/56848-an-unseemly-emotion-pw-talks-with-claire-messud.html"><em>Publisher’s Weekly</em></a> interviewer, Annasue McCleave Wilson, posed the question, “I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you? Her outlook is almost unbearably grim,” Messud volleyed back with indignance, and, yes, <em>anger</em>:</p> <p style="margin-left:.7in;"> 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 <em>The Corrections</em>? Any of the characters in <em>Infinite Jest</em>? …If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities.</p> <p align="center"> ~</p> <p> Let’s turn for a moment to a classic tale, replete with a villain and uncertainty, invoking fear and possibly anger in the reader: reliant upon a trail of breadcrumbs. Yes, breadcrumbs, and right away we recall this imaginary snaking maze, at first placed by young Hansel and Gretel, in all their innocence, juxtaposed with intensity of yearning—to live, to survive—that will appear thwarted when the crumbs, so impermanent and insufficient, disappear.</p> <p>  </p> <p> <img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/2messud%20%28nightscream%20Wiki%29.jpg" style="width: 578px; height: 600px;" /></p> <p>  </p> <p> <em>Hansel and Gretel</em> is not a story in the realist tradition, and yet it invokes very real, and realistic, dangers and fears: those of betrayal, being led astray; aloneness, loss and to be lost in an unknown woods; the opaque, even venomous or vengeful motives of adults; the disappearance and absence of other characters who matter so intently that they drive the story all the more potently in their absence: the mother, the father. What of Hansel and Gretel’s father? He is passive, and yet certainly shares responsibility for their predicament, having in a literal sense created the (evil) stepmother and subsequently adhered to her chilling plans. And the mother, well she is dead, offering her the utmost in both power and powerlessness, a metaphor we may find useful within <em>The Woman Upstairs</em>, in which Nora’s deceased mother drives the narrative with covert fierceness.</p> <p>  </p> <p> For this is the question of children, what have our parents done, and how shall we mimic it? Shall we avenge on their behalf, replicate, or rebel? Feminism, and femininity, press this question even more fiercely for women, who not only negotiate the external, public world of professions, but also a larger portion of the domestic realm. Intense generational change, and the complications therein, in the last 60 years, has left much still unsettled. Lisa Miller, like Wood and Messud, reminds us, in <a href="http://nymag.com/news/features/retro-wife-2013-3/"><em>New York Magazine</em></a>, “Feminism has never fully relieved women from feeling that the domestic domain is theirs to manage, no matter what else they’re juggling.” This remains the case despite words, often well-intentioned, to the contrary. Miller notes: “Before they marry, college students of both genders almost universally tell social scientists that they want marriages in which housework, child care, professional ambition, and moneymaking will be respectfully negotiated and fully shared.” Susan Maushart, in her 1999 book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Mask-Motherhood-Becoming-Mother-Changes/dp/0140291784/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1372655291&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=maushart+the+mask+of+motherhood"><em>The Mask of Motherhood</em></a>, puts it: “The ‘problem that has no name’ for today’s mother is the struggle to reconcile the rhetoric of equal opportunity with the stubbornly unequal realities of family life….”</p> <p>  </p> <p> The anger within <em>The Woman Upstairs</em> is predicated on Nora’s mother’s choices and admonishments and her unfulfilled life. She had her first child early, Nora’s older brother, and then Nora eight years later, never truly entering the workforce, reliant on her husband for pocket money and never able to move far from domestic life. When Nora suggests that her mother might pursue something more than the classes she periodically embarks on, her mother’s fraught response: “Didn’t you know, I make a house a home? That’s what mothers do.” But she tells Nora, “I want you to have it all. You won’t live off pin money, off any man, no matter how much you love him. You won’t depend on anyone but yourself. We agreed, right?” And Nora hears “there was that edge to her voice, which I thought of then as darkness, and recognize now as rage, the tone that came in her intermittent phases of despair.” It is no coincidence that rage and despair are here linked.</p> <p>  </p> <p> A generation later, and we have Sirena, working mother, trying to explain to Nora, working but without children of her own (besides her third graders, left in the school room): “But for me, it’s always running against the clock. Someone always waiting, Sirena you’re late, you’re late…it’s always too much.” Nora, on the surface of things, wishes for a life more like Sirena’s, a respected artist, married with a child, what Nora once imagined for herself. And yet we watch her thwart her own dreams, while she also finds the ploys and ass-kissing of the art world distasteful, wanting and not wanting to share in its privilege.</p> <p>  </p> <p> <img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/3messud%20%28Unique%20hotels%20group%20flickr%29.jpg" style="width: 398px; height: 600px;" /></p> <p>  </p> <p> Nora and Skandar gradually form a pattern of shared nighttime walks, as Skandar escorts Nora home, whether following a dinner <em>en famille</em>, or, more often, after Nora has stayed with Reza (as a dear family friend or as a babysitter, the difference immaterial and yet deeply significant), while the adult Shahids are out. On one such walk, their intimacy growing, Nora explains to Skandar how she has ended up here, in her life, 37 and single:</p> <p style="margin-left:.7in;">  [A]s we passed the cemetery where my mother was buried…I told him about going to see my mother’s grave, and then I told him about her, Bella Eldridge, and her years of illness, and her admirable grown-up combination of competence and resignation, and how furious it made me, how looking at her life I felt like a ravenous wolf, I wanted her to have had the chance to devour the world, to be greedy, to be sated. …And I told him …about how I’d grown up with my mother’s longing and had never found a way to fulfill it, how I’d always thought there were rules about what was possible and allowable, even though I hadn’t known, really, who’d made those rules. How in high school, art had seemed the way to break the rules, to get around them; but how it hadn’t, then, seemed properly grown up, afterward.</p> <p style="margin-left:.7in;">  </p> <p> “I couldn’t bear to be a failure,” Nora tells Skandar. “It seemed worse to try and fail than not to try.  And then my mother, you see—” The strictures of her mother’s limitations have been redesigned; Nora is <em>ravenous</em>; she is rage-filled; thwarted by tradition, whether steady or sundered.</p> <p>  </p> <p> “But,” as Nora’s friend Didi tells her, “you’ve got to want <em>something</em>.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> After all, even now, 50 years after publication of <em>The Feminine Mystique</em> and Betty Friedan’s eruption, like a volcano, precise in its locus and yet wide-spilling, indicative of uncertain and unpredictable volatility beneath the surface, into the public eye—even now we remain leery of female anger. Yes, it is distasteful. Better to show your stuff by climbing the ladder, rising; or by smoothing things over, the silent power of domestic control, whether transplanted into the workplace or not.</p> <p>  </p> <p> And indeed, one might leave <em>The Woman Upstairs</em> feeling that anger has not served Nora either. She has anger, she has reason for anger, and yet, really, in the scope of the novel, where has it taken her? It has, at least in part, been a ploy or distraction: and yet it speaks of truth and of the very real frustrations of women in a variety of situations: unmarried, married, with children or not. The real power here, that which Nora skirts around, testing and tasting, and yet still resisting, may well be desire (for meaning, achievement, love, artistry): dangerous and sharp.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Nora’s artistic ambitions, in the now of the novel, are evoked through painstaking work on dioramas, three distinct and separate miniature rooms, each focused on a female artist: Emily Dickinson, Alice Neal, and Edie Sedgewick. A fourth female artist/writer, Virginia Woolf, ironically (and one might presume deliberately, for Messud’s intelligence is keen) without “a room of her own” here, is evoked as frequently as the other three. We are told near the book’s conclusion that “Virginia Woolf, in her rage, stopped being afraid of death; but I’m angry enough, at last, to stop being afraid of life….” Rage is powerful; yet arguably Woolf’s suicide was more about rage internalized—about the boulders of depression (despair) and more—rather than rage as merry-greeter-of-death, a rather too romantic notion of suicide, depression, and mental illness. Nora’s rage, one hopes, might push her forward, finally, in contrast with her mother’s. But loose ends remain.</p> <p align="center"> ~</p> <p> This may not be Messud’s best novel. For this reader, it was hard to again find the whole-world intensity and beauty of <a href="http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-15-100471-3"><em>The Last Life</em></a>, Messud’s second work, in which a corollary urgency threads through, rendered within the young narrator’s compelling need to understand complexities of life that many an adult never takes on: exile, homeland, loss, generational twists and schisms and bonds and pains, the incomprehensibility of self-selected death and yet the pressing need to understand even when events and urges remain without discrete and finite sense. The greatest maturity arises in rendering the questions and needs, even when answers may remain absent and insufficient.</p> <p> <img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/4messud.jpg" style="width: 500px; height: 500px;" /></p> <p>  </p> <p> And yet, while <em>The Woman Upstairs</em> could be considered a less-compelling sequel of sorts (with entirely different characters that nonetheless share some of the same authorial concerns, including those of generational ties and schisms, exile, loss, and even the roles of women and of men, conscripted by society or family, broad and individuated), this work is hugely ambitious, and the more time spent with it the more evident this is.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Within the novel’s pages lies an intensity of female experience, focused on a particular life stage. The term middle-age has gone a bit out of fashion. Aren’t we all (by which we mean women of a certain class, more present via the media than in life) now perpetually able to avail ourselves of the fountain of youth? Botox and tummy tucks; physical strains of childrearing passed to others; technological gadgets able to keep us abreast of everything, current or au courant. But of course this is a myth; even while life expectancy extends further into the double-digits, and sometimes triple-, our bodies still age, and we still, at some middling point, approach at least a glimpse of the limits of what we might do.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Nora and Sirena both are driven by this specter of mortality (Messud, too). Sirena more productively (and more selfishly) than Nora, through her compulsion to create the most complete and complex version of her vision: an ever modulating <em>Wonderland</em>, an art installation meant to be experienced differently by each visitor, and yet to represent meaning and a female life stage for all. The artistic work, once complete, continues to create something new through video of its guests’ journeys, eventually to become their own exhibit. With Nora’s unwitting participation, this becomes a reminder that art is selfish, sometimes vengeful, and may involve the sacrifices of someone else, not just the artist.</p> <p>  </p> <p> The Woman Upstairs (notably referred to with capitals throughout the novel) represents the intellect in disuse and in use. The question throughout is how is the Woman (Upstairs) used or neglected, and how might she inhabit desire; what if she does, what if she does not? And what are desire’s limits and limitations?</p> <p>  </p> <p> Alas, this reader, who so wanted to fall into a world—remembering so intently a sense-memory of the complex and thoughtful world of <em>The Last Life</em>—came upon some measure of disappointment in the book’s middle: where was the sought-after other life (not a life to wish for but to experience and explore, finding meaning and parallels within)? But no, this was not a lasting wonderland. The Woman Upstairs does not inhabit wonderland, not as escape, not for long—and this is part of the point. The Woman Upstairs inhabits reality: of strained dreams, of other people’s children, of an aloneness not always chosen. (And forgive us here for excluding men in this overt way; but as with much of our literary tradition, in which women are invited to find themselves and versions of lives of meaning in the corridors of male experience, so here men too may find aspects of self within the confines of female experience, and surely will, with or without the male pronoun.)</p> <p>  </p> <p> Where Nora, as narrator and central protagonist, may cause the book to falter and suffer, is when she serves in the figurative chorus of the novel. <em>Anger, anger, anger</em>, we hear at regular intervals. Sometimes we feel Nora’s anger, or even more significantly the sting of inadequacy or rejection and the surge of desire (to make meaning and to mean something), that can either bring on anger or be fueled by it. But to be told of anger, however legitimate, damning, and interesting the circumstance, involves a different kind of engagement on behalf of the reader. We may not always feel it—for Nora, or for ourselves—within the reader-experience of the book. Instead we must consider it; we must think. To our detriment, we have grown accustomed to deeming novels places of experience (often vicarious, sometimes mirrored) and escape, not as journeys of thought. Must the province of the novel remain so shrunken?</p> <p align="center"> ~</p> <p> Skandar explains to Nora, about Lebanon, “You can allow yourself to be swallowed by your anger, but this will kill you.” Earlier, he had spoken to her of the assassination of his homeland’s prime minister the day before, and the accompanying deaths of 22 others. Sirena, hours prior, tells Nora of her husband, “His country is in mourning and in turmoil; and here, at the university, even at a private dinner, they want him to talk about this as if it were an idea, not a man, so many men.” Continuing, she chides, “Americans see everything too simply—a good guy, a bad guy, does he have a white hat or a black hat?” In this exchange, and the one that follows later that night, as Skandar walks Nora home, we see the shadows of the narrative, the authorial lines drawing things together, outlining a schema for reading.</p> <p> <img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/5Messud%20%28LST%201984%20Flickr%29.jpg" style="width: 600px; height: 400px;" /></p> <p> Skandar’s story from his youth, a parable of sorts, contains a panther he spotted as a five- or six-year-old, a sighting deemed impossible by his family—“there were no such animals in Lebanon”—until two mysterious “nocturnal sheep killings” change their minds. And soon the panther could be of “ghosts or sorcery”; it could be a metaphor for anger, dark and lurking.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Skandar tells Nora:</p> <p style="margin-left:.7in;"> ‘And yet how can you look at the panther, how can you look him in the eye, when he won’t stay still? When he’s nowhere and everywhere, belongs to no one and to everyone? So if you’re me, how you deal with this is that you say, I’ll look at how we talk about the panther. I’ll study the history of history, the ways that we tell the stories, and don’t tell other stories, and I’ll try to understand what it says about us, to tell one story rather than another, to tell it one way rather than another.’</p> <p style="margin-left:.7in;">  </p> <p> The eponymous “Woman Upstairs”—a multitude—contains fractured parts of the same woman. There is reason to love Messud’s anger—relish it, bathe in it, accept it as much needed succor. Anger can bring power. Messud told the audience at <a href="http://centerforfiction.org/calendar/claire-messud-the-woman-upstairs/">The Center for Fiction</a>, “I’ve never written a book so heartfelt.” When an audience member enquired, “Did you have trouble accessing that anger?” Messud answered with a resounding, “No.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> Virginia Woolf proclaimed the need for “a room of one’s own” (and also, not immaterially, 500 pounds a year). That room (and that sum, whatever it need be) represents not only security, but peace, solitude, time, and the use of one’s mind: some minimum of circumstances permitting access to another <em>Upstairs</em>, wherein lies our individuality, our intellect, our imagination -- all of which must be curtailed (particularly the first two, while the third might be put to different, slightly modified and constrained, alternate use) when caring for children. Parenting, particularly for mothers, requires sacrifice. Children demand and deserve it. For many women, this is a huge part of that period we have called “middle age”; bodies are changing, creaking that little bit more, shifting and easing out of reproductive capacities; and when children are present, they demand more of the interior resources that might once have gone elsewhere: to self, to art, to work, in all its forms. Partners, of course, figure into this too. And if we were to take a lesson from <em>The Woman Upstairs</em>—the novel would suggest that as ambitious as Sirena is—and, by the end, more celebrated than Skandar—it appears that it is she who must tend to her husband (and child) more than he to her. Skandar, a character drawn with loving strokes, is arguably the most concisely and thoroughly imparted of the book: complex and yet much tidier than his female compatriots. Lessons here too: another reminder of the unruly nature of female experience and its rendering.</p> <p>  </p> <p> The significant question beneath the text: What does it mean to be a woman writer? What does it mean to be a woman writer with children? But we seldom speak of this. Still, it is taboo: damned either way, whether to implicitly lessened ambitions or to “women’s themes,” which yet remain largely the domain of what the publishing world considers “women’s fiction” rather than “literature.” This is signaled through details such as choices in <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/07/coverflip-maureen-johnson_n_3231935.html">cover art</a>, influenced by and influencing gender suppositions. Fractured—as mothers, as women, as writers. The work of writing exists largely within a self-powered vacuum, the choices all too frequently uncomfortable, in ways familiar to many women balancing work and children.</p> <p>  </p> <p> When it comes to writing, as Messud put it in a 2006 <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/aug/20/bookerprize2006.thebookerprize"><em>Observer</em></a> interview, “You have to find the necessity of it because, frankly, nobody else cares, and once you have kids, nobody wants you to do it at all.” And if writing remains ephemeral, not-quite-work by many a productive-capitalist standard, then women’s writing all the more so. Messud wrote in <a href="http://www.guernicamag.com/features/seven_remarkable_women_claire/"><em>Guernica</em></a> in 2010, “[Women] are too often overlooked by the silly popularity contests that are juries and boards and lists. This is not a question of the writers’ quality but of our society’s habits, and of a habitual—and primarily lazy—cultural expectation that male writers are somehow more serious, more literary, or more interesting.” Messud continues,</p> <p style="margin-left:.7in;"> Here’s the deal: men, without thinking, will almost without fail select men. And women, without thinking, will too often select men. … Our cultural prejudices are so deeply engrained that we aren’t even aware of them: arguably, it’s not that we think men are better, it’s that we don’t think of women at all. The absence of women from lists and prizes leads, then, to the future absence of women from lists and prizes.</p> <p style="margin-left:.7in;">  </p> <p> Messud tells Katherine Rowland in her <a href="http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/interior-lives/"><em>Guernica</em></a> interview this spring, “The things that we associate with femaleness are not the single-minded, exclusive pursuit of a vocation, whether it be art or anything else. It is not a model that is widespread in our culture, it’s not something we think of for women.”</p> <p>  </p> <p> The august yet modestly trendy <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n10/emily-witt/how-awful"><em>London Review of Books</em></a> ran a review in May by a youngish (pre-middle age, let’s say) writer, Emily Witt, who quite blithely ran right over <em>The Woman Upstairs</em>, the review’s tone increasingly snide and, by conclusion, bordering on what the British like to call <em>whinging</em>. Witt concludes the review, which is rather banally titled “How Awful,” a double-entendre that does little for the review or the book (or for that matter the often lovely and pleasurable <em>LRB</em>): “Even at her happiest, Nora made me depressed.” The sentiment, following on the impatient tone of the rest of the review, looks to damn the book as implausible, and a “bad” read. One might more usefully turn to the reader, any of us, and say, Indeed, depressed, why is that? The answer rests less with Nora than with reality and the complex portrayal of creativity and gender, friendship, family, love, anger, and <em>ressentiment</em> that Messud has created with heartfelt intensity, a writer’s urgency fueling the narrative’s imperfect, warts and all, anger. Nora may not be likeable, but she is ours, for better and worse, her light on, for which we should be grateful, one hopes because her brain is alive, mercurial and inventive, not because we need her there waiting—for our dirty dishes, metaphoric or real.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Nora, good luck. The <a href="http://www.amazon.com/A-Dolls-House-Henrik-Ibsen/dp/148275911X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1372697550&amp;sr=8-3&amp;keywords=ibsen+a+dolls+house">dollhouse</a> doors are open.</p> <p>  </p> <p> <strong>Author Bio:</strong></p> <p> <em>Kara Krauze is a contributing writer at</em> Highbrow Magazine.</p> <p>  </p> <p> <em><strong>Photos: Nightscream (Wikipedia Commons); Unique Hotels Group (Flickr); LST1984 (Flickr).</strong></em></p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/woman-upstairs" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">the woman upstairs</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/claire-messud" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">claire messud</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/james-wood" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">james wood</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/last-life" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">the last life</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">literature</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/authors" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">authors</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/publishing" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">publishing</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/books" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">books</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/novels" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">novels</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/emperors-children" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">the emperor&#039;s children</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Kara Krauze</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-pop field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Popular:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">not popular</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-bot field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Bottom Slider:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Out Slider</div></div></div> Fri, 02 Aug 2013 14:07:04 +0000 tara 3282 at https://www.highbrowmagazine.com https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/2667-writer-s-rage-reading-claire-messud-s-woman-upstairs#comments