'The Woman Upstairs,' by Claire Messud In "The Woman Upstairs," her fifth book, Messud, who also wrote the best-seller "The Emperor's Children," has created Nora Eldridge, a narrator whose first utterance brims with indignation as she catalogs the rules she's followed. The world expects a woman to remain nice and good, so a woman's private anger revealed is a delicious, bracing prospect. After Sirena invites the dazzled Nora to rent a studio with her, Nora throws herself into the art she'd all but abandoned, making tiny, precise replicas of Dickinson's room and the rooms of Virginia Woolf, Edie Sedgewick and Alice Neel. Instead of taking us further into her mind, Nora's obsessive, bland ponderings begin to bore, and while this novel is structured like a page-turner, the reader tires of being told something is happening when nothing happens. In remembering a teenage kiss, Nora says, "I'd long thought him cool, but he proved - it was a surprise to realize this was possible - as awkward as I was, the upshot of which was that the kiss was neither repeated nor ever again mentioned."