"The Woman Upstairs," by Claire Messud Ulf Andersen/Getty images Claire Messud Claire Messud's latest novel, "The Woman Upstairs," is an incongruous mashup of a very self-consciously literary novel (invoking the likes of Chekhov) and one of those psychological horror films like "Single White Female" or "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle," in which someone, ominously, is not who she appears to be. Ms. Messud's dazzling 1999 novel, "The Last Life," showcased her abundant literary gifts: her understanding of the complexities of familial algebra and the intersection of public and private history. Though less organic and emotionally satisfying, her 2006 novel, "The Emperor's Children," attested to her ability to write a best seller that moved back and forth between the comic and the tragic, the satirical and the intimately personal. "The Woman Upstairs" boasts an even splashier, attention-grabbing plot, but it never makes a leap into narrative hyperspace. The reader can never quite shrug off the sense that the novel is a sort of laboratory experiment that hasn't entirely gelled, an experiment in which an author who writes with Jamesian attention to emotional nuance has tried to inject a tabloidy story line with literary import. Whereas the tale of a family's dissolution in "The Last Life" possessed all the visceral complexities and unexpected developments of real life, the story in "The Woman Upstairs" has a schematic quality, as if points on an outline were being methodically ticked off and fleshed out. And while Ms. Messud does an intricate job of mapping her heroine's inner life, the literary references can sometimes feel horribly heavy-handed: it's hard to forget that the whiny narrator is a woman named Nora, who just happens to build little dioramas that look like dollhouses. It's as if these allusions had been lacquered onto the story to compensate for its more sensationalistic and contrived plot twists involving sex, lies and videotape. Nora, as we quickly learn, is one very angry woman, who, like her namesake in Ibsen's "Doll's House," is in search of an identity for herself. She's a third-grade teacher who has spent her life being the good girl, the A student, the devoted daughter, the responsible "woman upstairs" - not the madwoman in the attic, she insists. She's the kind of woman who might be a close relative of Ellison's Invisible Man or Dostoyevsky's Underground Man. Her mother's nickname for her was Mouse. Nora's mother, who felt suffocated in her suburban marriage, exhorted Nora to go out in the world, get a job and not become dependent on a man: " "Don't ever get yourself stuck like this," she hissed." Becoming a teacher was a practical choice, but Nora has dreamed of another life - a life as an artist, as an urban sophisticate, at home in places like Paris and Rome and Madrid, not teaching elementary school in Cambridge, Mass. She won plaudits in high school for coming up with an inventive solution to an art assignment and since then has secretly cherished wild ambitions. Her current project consists of little dollhouselike constructions, depicting rooms inhabited by Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Alice Neel and Edie Sedgwick. It's hard for the reader to tell how trustworthy a narrator Nora is, and things get considerably messier after she meets the Shahid family. The Shahids have moved to Cambridge from Paris for a year, and their son, Reza, is one of Nora's newest students. Nora promptly falls in love with every member of the family. She thinks of Reza as the ideal child and fantasizes that he is her son. She comes to think of his mother, Sirena - who is an up-and-coming conceptual artist in Europe - as her idealized self, the artist she might have been if she hadn't ended up taking care of her ailing mother. And she comes to think of Sirena's husband, Skandar, a visiting professor at Harvard, as her ideal man, and dreams of having sex with him. In a direct reference to Chekhov's story "The Black Monk," Nora describes the Shahids as her "three Black Monks" who for a brief period reawaken her to the possibilities of life. At 37, just when she thinks her life has prematurely closed, she feels as if a door were opening. An earlier version of this review misstated the surname of a family of characters in Claire Messud's novel. They are the Shahid family, not the Shadid family.