I just read Claire Messud’s The
Woman Upstairs. My agent recommended
it to me. She said it just kind of drifts
along for 250 pages and then it kicks you in teeth in the last chapter. (She may not have used exactly those words). Well, my agent is right, although of course
if somebody’s told you that you’re going get kicked in the teeth, it’s not quite
the surprise it would be otherwise.
The book isn’t specifically about
walking, but the all-American heroine and narrator Nora embarks on a long
flirtation with a brooding Lebanese professor named Skandar, and walking
together figures largely in the seduction process. (Nora also has a passion for Skandar's wife, though they don't actually get it together physically). Nora and Skandar walk and talk. Skandar says,
“… In
our lives, we span many worlds and many centuries, sometimes without taking a
step.”
He said
this while we were walking, and I laughed and gestured at the Cambridge streets
around us and replied, “And sometimes you take many steps and stay in just one
world.”
It’s the kind of book in which people say things like that. However, when things go pear-shaped in the relationship,
as we knew they would, she eventually goes alone on a tour of Europe, and in
Naples, as she experiences a sudden burst of feeling she says to herself, “Who is he
who walks always beside you? No-fucking
body thank you very much. I walk alone,” thereby invoking, and subverting, and very possibly
insulting, TS Eliot, Ernest Shackleton, William Burroughs, and of course the
Bible. Quite an achievement.
I haven’t been able to find a picture of Claire Messud walking (neither alone nor with others) but here
she is standing in her house with some books. We know she has many more
elsewhere.
