Rare consensus on book group on the issues and problems in The Woman Upstairs

Though a low-attendance book-group meeting last night we achieved a rare consensus, with all concurring that the narrator of Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs was an extremely annoying and unsympathetic personality that made it very hard to be interested in or to care for the novel itself. We went over a # of the observations I'd made in my posts on this novel - why it is that Nora wrote this narrative (for revenge, as noted in last pages of the book), the clash between an unsophisticated and needy middle-aged aspiring artist and a pair of slick Europeans already well tapped into the vein of fame and acclaim). We raised two or three main questions in the discussion. BR raised the interesting possibility that Sirena included the videos of Nora in her exhibition as a revenge against Nora for having an affair w/ her husband - which, like Nora's masturbation sequence, would have been caught on surveillance video. We pretty much decided that was unlikely, as, whatever may or may not have been going on with Nora and S's husband Sirena was certainly complicit - tolerating two hour walks home, etc. It's as if she pushed her husband on Nora - to further entrap Nora? Because that's the way it's done in her free-thinking set? Not made clear why. We discussed quite a bit why Sirena and husband (Skander?) essentially ignored Nora when they left Cambridge. I think it was a matter of out-of-sight, out-of-mind - they'd used her like a piece of tissue and now tossed her aside. She was not of their set or status. Also possible, however, that Sirena felt guilt about using the video in her exhibition. We agreed that her doing so was an incredibly brazen act; it's almost unimaginable that one would capture video of even a casual friend or acquaintance and use it in the exhibition without telling them, let alone asking. We also thought that many opportunities to make the plot better were squandered: I noted my original theory that Sirena and Skander were entirely of Nora's imagination; also we discussed why Messud didn't make more of the 3rd-graders' visit to the studio - all of us thought his was heading for something more dramatic, such as a parent complaint about exposing children to pornography, or injury from one of the "shards." But not much happened. Finally, was Sirena really such a great artist, or just a blowhard? Her work certainly doesn't sound so amazing, but let's give Messud a Mulligan on that, as it's very hard to describe artwork in a novel - she says it's well received, so let's accept that: but I think part of Messud's message is that the fame machine, both in art and academics, is a lot about politics and connections - everything Sirena does is considered great because of the gallery who represents her, etc., just as Skander (if that's his name) is considered a fount of wisdom on the Middle East while he seems to us like a blowhard. That may be the true point of this novel.