Claire Messud's latest novel features a protagonist who rages against all she has lost – bring it on
Cries of sexism are being heard from across the Atlantic after Annasue McCleave Wilson suggested to the novelist Claire Messud she "wouldn't want to be friends" with Nora, the angry protagonist of Messud's new novel The Woman Upstairs.
"Her outlook is almost unbearably grim," said the reporter from trade magazine Publishers Weekly.
Messud was unimpressed, and fired back an enjoyably steaming response:
"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 The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you're reading to find friends, you're in deep trouble."
According to Messud the "relevant question" isn't whether a character is "a potential friend", but "Is this character alive?" Her protagonist isn't "unbearably grim" at all, she continues. "Nora is telling her story in the immediate wake of an enormous betrayal by a friend she has loved dearly. She is deeply upset and angry. But most of the novel is describing a time in which she felt hope, beauty, elation, joy, wonder, anticipation – these are things these friends gave to her, and this is why they mattered so much. Her rage corresponds to the immensity of what she has lost."
Would Philip Roth have been asked the same question, ponders Publishing Perspectives's Dennis Abrams, while Salon's David Daley calls it a "reductive" question "about the likability of her main character – a question that might not be posed to a male author in quite this way". At Slate, Katie Roiphe admires "Messud's spirit", but points out that Ian McEwan, for example, has been pulled up for having unlikable characters, and finds that "the tendency to blame the world for a blanket, raging sexism that only partly exists, to put off on the publishing industry, or the sexism of an interviewer, or the editors of this magazine or that one, is perhaps sometimes to oversimplify the question".
Aside from the fact that yes, actually, I would quite like to be friends with Oedipus, and Hamlet, and most definitely Oscar Wao, I think it's going a little far to dismiss the (female) interviewer's question as sexist. It seems obvious to me that she's just trying to get Messud to elaborate on why she chose to write such an angry character.
It's clearly touched a nerve with Messud, though. Maybe it was just the latest in a series of inane questions Messud has had to answer, and it tipped her over the edge – look at some of the corkers collected here for other women writers, ranging from shoes to weight to dates.
At any rate, Messud's feisty response has made me desperate to read The Woman Upstairs, and find out for myself what makes Nora such a challenging companion. I have been known in the past to take against books because I can't stand a character – I know I shouldn't – but it's usually because they're too insipid. Nora sounds brilliant. The novel is just out here in the UK, and Ron Charles's stellar writeup in the Washington Post has made sure it's going on my to-be-read pile. "Lean in – she'll singe your eyebrows off," he writes. "What a slap in the face ... to be hit by Messud's opening line: 'How angry am I? You don't want to know.' This is Nora Eldridge: 42, single, childless, a respected teacher at Appleton Elementary in Cambridge, Mass. 'Don't all women feel the same?' she insists. 'The only difference is how much we know we feel it, how in touch we are with our fury ... I'll set the world on fire. I just might.' Think Medea as a third-grade teacher."
I can't wait.
via Books: Fiction | guardian.co.uk
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