Claire Messud. (Photo by Ulf Andersen/Getty images)

Into the ongoing debate over whether or not women can “have it all” comes a Molotov cocktail thrown by an unlikely provocateur. Claire Messud’s new novel, The Woman Upstairs (Knopf, 272 pp., $25.95), posits that the natural state of womanhood, at least after age 40, is to have nothing, and that satisfaction of any sort can come only via self-deception.

Ms. Messud’s brief novel comes seven years after The Emperor’s Children, a book that appraises the vanities and prejudices of a group of recent Brown graduates who are too educated for their own good and, at the novel’s commencement, untouched by tragedy. Her protagonist here, Nora Eldridge, is older (she’s 42) and dramatically overeducated (at least, so she thinks) for her job teaching elementary school in suburban Massachusetts. Her soul is marbled by a series of disappointments. The Emperor’s Children used September 11, 2001, as a narrative device to convey just how much innocence its protagonists had lost; there are no such real-world incursions into Nora’s psyche. The disaster, for her, is happening daily.

“I’m not crazy,” Nora declares at the beginning of the novel. “Angry, yes; crazy, no.” If we are in the hands of an unreliable narrator, it is only because, as Ms. Messud well knows, a person who declares “I’m not crazy” by way of introducing herself is the sort to be distrusted. Nora goes on to describe how she is “invisible” to the wider world and to note that, after a recent hiatus from her job, she might “set the world on fire.” Before she begins to recount the series of events resulting in the lull in her teaching career, the reader is left to wonder whether Nora is radically transparent or opaque even to herself, unable to brook the possibility that she might be deluded in her hopes.

And those hopes—drawn vaguely at first so as to further muddle the question of whether Nora is in her right mind—come to a head quickly. Nora begins to describe one of her students, a boy named Reza, the scion of a globe-trotting couple of the sort that even the sanest reader would find infuriatingly perfect. From her first recollections of Reza and his family, it’s clear that some sort of transference is occurring between our protagonist and Sirena, Reza’s mother. (There’s the sense that if this perfect family weren’t the source of Nora’s attentions, it would have been some other one.)

Nestled next to each other are two brief chapters, one in which Nora recalls receiving praise in high school for a particularly subversive art project (“it gave me such satisfaction”) and one where she first meets Reza’s mother, an artist by trade (“It felt inevitable, this meeting, like a chance, like a door opening”).

Sirena is all that Nora is not—self-possessed, artistically fulfilled, a mother, foreign. Some of these are traits Nora might have had. And Nora sets herself upon a project of insinuating herself into Sirena’s life, though it seems to the instigator merely to be the natural progression of friendship. The growing closeness between the two seems like pity on Sirena’s part, until it does not. The two women even begin making art together. Sirena has the good grace not to bring up her successes in their caffeine-fueled art sessions, and Nora has the self-preservation instinct to leave out the memories of her former creativity.

The other women in Nora’s life seem not to include anyone to whom she might relate: a lesbian couple, nagging and obtuse; a set of co-workers far more invested in their jobs; her mother, deceased. In Sirena, Nora has found the proof that she is not crazy: she is good enough for this better woman, she need not view herself as a woman society has rejected, an archetypal “Woman Upstairs with her cats and her pots of tea and her Sex and the City reruns and her goddamn Garnet Hill catalog.”

Long after their relationship is sundered, Nora still refuses to see herself in such a condescending manner. She is no Garnet Hill reader, if you will. Ms. Messud’s novel, which uses the notion of the resigned, docile “Woman Upstairs” as a motif throughout, is simultaneously a justification for extreme acts in the name of friendship and Nora’s rallying cry for women like her to rage against the world that has been handed to them. The Woman Upstairs avoids moral judgment: Nora’s actions are appalling, and Sirena’s eventual betrayal of Nora’s confidence and privacy are indefensibly cruel to a woman who sees everything in life as something that happened to her. For a moment, Nora is unambiguously right about something. It’s Sirena’s callousness and self-satisfaction, late in the book, that justify Nora finally as something more than the collected ramblings of someone we know we ought not to have trusted, and they keep the debate over Nora’s intentions going once the book has been replaced on the shelf.

Nora is both sympathetic and horrific. She is at once raising a voice to deep-seated misogyny against aging women and confirming every bias. Spun differently, her tale recalls Zoë Heller’s What Was She Thinking? (later adapted into the film Notes on a Scandal)—a slow drip of anecdotes reveling in closeness to a friend who represents a gateway to another, better life. But the difference between the two books is Ms. Messud’s ability to find the frailty, even the artist, in Nora, which makes Sirena more complex as well. For all her perfection, Sirena’s rebukes along the way, as when she visits Nora’s class and criticizes her teaching, seem, somehow, unconscionably depraved.

The novel offers no comfort in the end. It is, at last, the story of a woman for whom reality and a rich fantasy life have merged. “Maybe you can’t protect one from the other,” Nora muses. Filled with rage at Sirena, Nora resolves, at long last, not to lean in but to jump off, to “fucking well live.” What, then, was she doing before?

editorial@observer.com

Teddy Wayne.

Teddy Wayne is an iconoclast, at least when it comes to sandwiches. At the Times Square Hard Rock Cafe (his choice) to discuss The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, his novel about a prepubescent pop star, Mr. Wayne looked over the list of so-called “Legendary” burgers.

“Everything here is legendary,” he said. I suggested that the Hard Rock Cafe was a pretty venerable institution—remember all those T-shirts? “No, I feel like from the first day it was legendary. They created their own legend.”

Mr. Wayne, 33, had asked to meet at the Hard Rock in order to draw inspiration from the musical artifacts on the walls. He also wanted to nosh on a burger, the favorite food of Jonny Valentine, the 11-year-old protagonist of his new novel. Described as an “angel of pop,” Valentine is younger and less stratospherically successful than Justin Bieber, but a pretty clear stand-in for the Canadian singer. (It turned out the Nirvana memorabilia on the walls of the Hard Rock didn’t have a whole lot to do with Jonny’s tale.) The fictional child star is not a music lover, but rather more of a tactical, strategic marketer of his own brand.

“I’m a music fan, but I noticed that most literary novels about music are almost invariably about good music,” said Mr. Wayne. “Understandably, most novelists would not want to spend two or three years writing about music that’s bad.”

Mr. Wayne passionately pursues subject matter that most people would consider weird. His only previous effort, Kapitoil, sidesteps the first-novel roman à clef trap and tells the story of a Qatari computer engineer working in oil futures. His “Shouts & Murmurs” columns for The New Yorker are bizarro-
world fantasies about Dick Cheney, Shakespeare and Don Draper rather than the usual commentary on the foibles of wealthy, idle Manhattanites.

“Why not take a chance with subject matter once in a while?” he said. “I have no interest in writing a book about the fraying tensions in a dissolving marriage.”

The new book, told over the course of a few stops on Jonny’s “Valentine Days” national tour, depicts the building pressures on a boy who thinks he knows everything about contemporary music stardom (“The trick, I learned from the guitarist on my first tour, is to focus on a vendor, since the vendors never care about you,” Jonny thinks during one of his concerts). Offstage, Jonny must confront an absentee dad, hard-drinking tour mates, and his manager and mother Jane Valentine, a controlling, coke-snorting but not entirely despicable woman who is a melange of every Us Weekly nightmare of the past decade. Jonny’s career is in danger. So is his sense of self. Then again, the two are interchangeable.

For a person who invested years into a book about a bubblegum pop star, Mr. Wayne is not particularly enthused by the music of Justin Bieber and his ilk. He doesn’t own any of Mr. Bieber’s records. For research, he said, “I’d listen to the music on YouTube. I read a lot of child-star biographies and autobiographies, like Drew Barrymore’s Little Girl Lost and Tatum O’Neal’s Paper Life.” He was also inspired by The New Yorker’s 2012 profile of Ester Dean, the songwriter largely responsible for Rihanna’s meteoric rise. “It shows you how unjust the world is, that the one who’s actually the songwriter doesn’t get the credit,” he said.

Jonny Valentine is self-possessed onstage but thrown into confusion in his life by the sort of family drama and earthly temptation that seem to await every pop star eventually. Mr. Bieber is the natural analogue, though Mr. Wayne doesn’t consider him to be all that flawed yet. Mr. Bieber is, Mr. Wayne observed, “18 now, and soon he’ll start going to nightclubs and bars and dens of iniquity—but he seems to have his head on straight. What if someone were in a position like that but were not self-sufficient? Jonny Valentine does what most of us would do—his insecurity, self-doubt and fear, and not viewing it as a fun, wild ride.”

Teddy Wayne has all the classic trappings of a rising novelist—the clips from Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and The New York Times (as well as this newspaper), the Whiting Writers’ Award, the gig teaching creative writing in town (at Marymount Manhattan College). But the finer points of late-publishing self-promotion have so far escaped him. “I think I’ve tweeted this—the initial shame of being on Twitter is compounded by the shame of not having any followers,” he said. “Nothing I tweet ever takes off. I’m hopeless on Twitter.” Like a frontier American confronted with the new technology of the camera, he fears for his soul. “Every time I tweet, a little part of me dies.”

But he isn’t chasing after the fame of Jeffrey Eugenides or Jonathan Franzen, let alone that of a pop star. “I went through what just about every writer goes through when the first book comes out, which is the shock of a Word document becoming a public book. It makes you very vulnerable. I started wondering, how do actual celebrities deal with it? If I’m getting this worked up over a bad Amazon review, how would you deal with the tabloids?”

Mr. Wayne deals with them quite well, in his writing anyway. In the novel’s metatextual gossip columns, he jumps styles with ease, mimicking Gawker-style bitchiness (“As if we needed confirmation that Jonny Valentine concerts are attended and exclusively by lovelorn prepubescent girls and rapey old men, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is reporting that a 57-year-old St. Louis man was arrested after hurling a slew of violently sexual epithets at the Angel of Poop Pap Smears Pop during his live televised performance ...”), self-serious music critics (“Exactly how does a 46-year-old male music critic open a review of a Jonny Valentine concert he is forced to attend? And to maintain proper journalistic house style, must he really refer to an 11-year-old boy hereafter as ‘Mr. Valentine’?”) and the basest tabloid fodder (“Send an RSVP to your local arena: Jonny Valentine is cruising into your city!”).

Mr. Wayne says he is repulsed by self-promotion, even as he riffs on it. “Let’s chalk it up to a late-capitalist contradiction.” (In the novel, Jonny is too young to manage his social media presence, so his mother does it for him.) He objects to “non-
celebrities like us putting photos on Facebook of ourselves drinking and partying. That’s our own paparazzi. We’re paparazzi-
ing ourselves.” (Mr. Wayne’s Facebook has all of three photos uploaded, but he may have only granted The Observer access to a limited profile.)

Though Mr. Wayne has limited interest in Bieber qua Bieber, he is attracted to the mechanics of fame, having initially conceived of Jonny Valentine as a comic novel when he saw a girl at 826 Valencia (where he tutors) reading Miley Cyrus’s memoir. “It’s one of those books where there are a lot of photos and then words on a 10th of a page.” He’d suggested to a frequent collaborator that they work together on a purely slapstick version of the Cyrus book based on the life of a fake pop star, then had another thought an hour later. “I realized, if I take this seriously and don’t play it for laughs, this could be a novel. I started writing it that day, and wrote 3,000 words.”

His publisher, Free Press, is hoping to get the book into universities for incoming freshmen. Given young Jonny’s sexual fixations and reliance on prescription medication to sleep post-concert, one can imagine it being banned instead. Despite his age, Jonny experiences an actual backstage sexual encounter—or an attempt at one, anyway—that is more than a little unsettling.

“In a lot of books narrated by 11- or 12-year-olds, the kids are prodigies, verbal prodigies, and the reason is you can’t have a novel from the actual perspective of a 12-year-old, because ... it’s a 12-year old. So novelists will create a kid who’s a genius, so that adults can read it. I wanted to have some adult-ness to him and some childishness to him.”

Childish to the extent that any child star can be. As with Justin Bieber, who has had his every move documented in real time on the Internet for several years now, Jonny Valentine’s future is far from certain even as the book ends. His career is doing fine, but he still concludes, moments after selling out Madison Square Garden, “I’d work twice as hard. I’d sacrifice everything in my life that held me back.”

editorial@observer.com

While you’re out there trying to find your little hell-raiser a dress for her coming-out at the International Debutante Ball later in the month, we’re grateful that we only have to worry about taking care of our pup! And Rufus will absolutely adore tonight’s Toys for Dogs benefit party, a human-and-canine shindig where the humans open their wallets and donate toys for Sandy relief, and the dogs get a photo op with Santa Claus. For those not blessed with a four-legged plus-one, the Humane Society of New York is bringing rescue dogs for guests to check out—you know you say you’ll be leaving alone, but after one candy-cane martini, you might just find that cuddly friend you’d been hoping Santa might bring. (That’s the joy of Christmas as an adult: you’re old enough to buy yourself presents.)

Amnesia, 609 West 29th Street, 6:30pm, tickets and information can be found at animalfair.com.

Arden Wohl

Not all art-collecting this month is going on in Miami: tonight brings the opening reception for the Young Collectors Exhibition, a diverse set of works intended for young (read: a level below Sotheby’s on desired price point) patrons. The whole show, put on by Leila Heller Gallery and WASP bible Town & Country, raises money for the Pollock-Krasner Foundation’s Hurricane Sandy relief fund, to aid those artists whose livelihoods were affected by the lower-Manhattan floodwaters ... Meanwhile, Uma Thurman, Eric Ripert and the perpetually headband-wearing Arden Wohl stop by the Tibet House benefit auction at Christie’s, for which Martin Scorsese (on a break from shooting that new Leo flick) serves as one of the honorary chairs.

Leila Heller Gallery, 568 West 25th Street, opening reception tonight at 6:30pm, exhibition remains open through January 12, information can be found at leilahellergallery.com; Tibet House benefit auction, Christie’s Auction House, 20 Rockefeller Plaza, 6:30pm, tickets can be obtained by calling 845-658-4150.

Katie Holmes

It’s been a typically weird season for Broadway, with little orphan Annie once again captivating audiences with her story of a little girl getting plucked from obscurity by a Romneyesque billionaire, Katie Holmes breaking free from Scientology’s clutches by starring in an intimate chamber-piece of a drama, and the expeditious closing of David Mamet’s latest play as a revival of his Glengarry Glen Ross extended its preview period for what felt like an eternity. And all of that will come up for mockery at tonight’s 2017 Tony Awardz, a midseason check-in taking on the year’s best, worst and most laughable in the form of an awards show in the not-too-distant future. Maybe by then, Ms. Holmes will be our generation’s Kristin Chenoweth.

Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, 307 West 26th Street, 9:30pm, tickets and information can be found at newyork.ucbtheatre.com.

Max von Sydow

A weeks-long tribute to Max Von Sydow concludes at BAM with a screening of Never Say Never Again, the Bond flick in which the forbidding Swede faces off against an aging Sean Connery over a hijacked nuclear warhead; this good-bad slice of cheese may not exactly be The Seventh Seal, but last night’s von Sydow screening at BAM was the bad-bad Dune ... Meanwhile, the Film Forum features the dark animated film Consuming Spirits, a dystopic story whose complicated animations took 15 years to complete. Director Chris Sullivan appears at the 6:30 screening tonight to explain just how this differs from your typical Pixar flick.

Never Say Never Again, BAM Rose Cinemas, 30 Lafayette Avenue (Brooklyn), tickets and information can be found at bam.org/film; Consuming Spirits features director Christopher Sullivan at 6:30pm screening, Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, box office can be reached at (212) 727-8110.

Lucy Liu

We thought ladies’ lunches were the province of the warmer months—when you just can’t wait to sneak away from the office (or the manse) for a cool glass of white wine and some cursory salmon destined to be left uneaten—but the Muse Awards are proving us wrong. This ceremony honoring women in the entertainment industry pays tribute to, among others, Mariska Hargitay (Jayne Mansfield’s daughter who’s now more famous for investigating sex crimes for more than a decade on NBC’s SVU), Lucy Liu (the former Ally McBeal spitfire who’s now on surprise TV hit Elementary) and documentarian Lisa F. Jackson. Expect lots of air-kisses.

New York Hilton, Grand Ballroom, 1335 Avenue of the Americas, 12:30pm, tickets and information can be found at nywift.org.

Cicely Tyson

The New York City Mission Society is celebrating its 200th birthday tonight—and with age comes a few privileges, like getting distinguished guests to join in your cause. Legendary actress Cicely Tyson (who’s bound for Broadway in an upcoming The Trip to Bountiful revival), the Rev. Dr. Calvin O. Butts III, philanthropist Jean Shafiroff and former Mayor David Dinkins will all be in attendance at tonight’s shindig honoring the society’s work on behalf of the city’s less fortunate. Tonight’s honorees include Ms. Tyson as well as former attorney Kathryn C. Chenault, who’s spent her post-courtroom years supporting the arts, education and health care across the city. We’ll be following her example and opening up our wallets at the silent auction.

The Pierre Hotel, 2 East 61st Street, cocktails and silent auction at 6pm, dinner and awards at 7:30pm, dancing at 9pm, tickets and information can be found at nycmissionsociety.org/bicentennial-gala.

Mummenschanz.

For those families who’ve already gone and seen the Rockettes, Mummenschanz is to provide a terrifying dose of surrealism, just in time for the holidays. Mummenschanz, the Swiss troupe famed for truly trippy masks and shapes (think: dancers who look like giant Slinkys, or who hold the components of a floating, disembodied face), has returned to New York, and tonight is its opening night show. The Swiss consul general posted in New York is hosting the evening: after all, when your nation assiduously avoids war, your diplomats can focus on puppetry!

NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, 556 LaGuardia Place, curtain at 7pm, tickets for the four-week run (through January 6) can be found at mummenschanznyc.com.

Illustration by Jason Seiler

Amid all the speculation about Barack Obama’s newfound mojo, a hotly anticipated stiffening of his political spine inspired by his decisive victory in November, a somewhat more intriguing question has scarcely been asked.

Will Michelle finally step out?

The Harvard-trained attorney has always been, for those on the right, a more threatening character than her husband. After all, Mr. Obama merely received that famous fist bump—or as Fox News had it, “terrorist fist jab”—in the moments before delivering his speech at the Democratic National Convention; Michelle initiated it. It was she who revealed that the future president woke up “snore-y and stinky” in the morning, part of the campaign’s aggressive bid to humanize him that had the side effect of further elevating her (After all, if America’s demigod wakes up less than perfect, what would she think of us?) And it was Michelle who included a line about how the nation is “just downright mean” and “guided by fear”—in her 2008 stump speech—and once notoriously allowed that she was “for the first time in my adult lifetime ... really proud of my country.” And, of course, it was Michelle who finally extended the right to “bare arms” to political spouses and, as the Times Style section put it, “spurred an epidemic of sleevelessness.”

My goodness, the guns on that woman!

Whether the infamous “whitey” video—a Holy Grail of the right, in which Michelle is said to employ the dated epithet—ever existed at all outside the fever dreams of dirty trickster Roger Stone Jr. (which it almost definitely did not), the first lady has worked hard to dispel our fears. Over the last four years, the perceived Angela Davis-style radical has been replaced by a smoothly competent political professional, whose causes seem more Lady Bird Johnson than Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Not that there haven’t been a few missteps: wearing Lanvin sneakers to a food bank, eating Shake Shack (albeit in moderation) despite her healthy-food exhortations and hugging Queen Elizabeth. In general, though, Ms. Obama has been a notably careful FLOTUS, campaigning for exercise (what could be less controversial than that?) and embodying the role of wholesome mom-in-chief. Far from reinventing the job of first lady, the first black woman to set up house in the East Wing has turned out to be something of a traditionalist. At least so far. Now, with the exigencies of a second presidential campaign behind her, some are hoping Ms. Obama will finally let her freak flag—whatever that might look like—fly.

“There’s this sense that the real Michelle Obama, this endearingly frank woman we met in the spring of 2008, is going to come back to the fore,” noted New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor. “I think any change in her during the presidency is going to be one of degree. The real change is going to be in the post-presidency. Once she’s out of the White House and her husband will no longer hold office, she truly will be liberated. She will still be a young woman, and she’ll be one of the most famous and influential women in the world.”

“For first ladies, I do think second terms tend to be a bit more interesting,” said Daily Beast fashion writer Robin Givhan, whose beat is the intersection of style and politics and who has often written about Michelle. “It was in the second term when Laura Bush spoke out about Burma. So I will be intrigued to see if Mrs. Obama decides that she’s going to add a third leg to her platform, which now is divided between the support of military personnel and the Let’s Move campaign.”

While Ms. Givhan declined to speculate as to what that third project might be, conservatives are plainly terrified. As a piece on Right Side News ominously put it, “Much like Hillary, she will be assigned more involvement in affairs of state, appointed to committees, and public appearances of a political nature will become more frequent, not to speak of a barrage of friendly television repartee on shows like The View, late night talk, and more. In essence, the grooming will begin.”

Blame Ms. Clinton for the lofty expectations: the former first lady-turned-well-liked senator-turned-presidential candidate-turned-secretary of state-turned-beloved Internet meme is the new paradigm for first ladies. (Even Laura Bush, the very picture of a traditional political spouse, went on an extensive book tour in 2010, during which she spoke out on her policy differences from her husband. Turns out she’s pro-gay marriage and supports Roe v. Wade!)

Ms. Obama, in spite of her rather rocky introduction, has the skill set of a politician, as she amply demonstrated with her 2012 Democratic National Convention speech, in which she passionately recounted the story of her early marriage and her dad’s health struggles, making Ann Romney’s tuna-salad recollections look hopelessly drab and out of touch. Though Ms. Obama was hardly the first first lady to get an advanced degree or work outside the home—Laura Bush has a master’s and was a teacher and librarian, and Nancy Davis acted in films after her marriage to Ronald Reagan—she was the first one to have a higher-profile career than her husband for a time. While Barack was working on his memoir and commuting between Chicago and Springfield as a state senator, Michelle was climbing the ladder at the University of Chicago Hospitals system; even when he became a U.S. senator, she was the spouse bringing home the real bacon. It’s not surprising that with Illinois Senator Mark Kirk up for re-election in 2016, speculation has already emerged that Michelle will make a run at the seat. A recent poll had her trouncing the Republican 51 to 40 percent. Trouble is, the first lady may not be interested.

In her book The Obamas, Ms. Kantor reported that Michelle Obama strongly considered the idea of remaining in Chicago and letting Barry turn the White House into a bachelor pad in order to allow little Sasha and Malia to continue their school year in Chicago. “It’s hard to overstate how little she wanted to go into politics,” Ms. Kantor told The Observer, “and it wasn’t just because of the family reasons she sometimes cites. She had a real objection to the nature of politics. She thought it wasn’t the right way to create social change.”

She’s disappointed liberals before. Many expected her to advocate strongly for progressive causes during her husband’s first term, but she largely kept quiet. Historian and America’s First Ladies author Betty Boyd Caroli said that she’d expected Mrs. Obama to more aggressively champion the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009, for instance. “I was disappointed,” Ms. Caroli said. “I expected her to be Superwoman. But it doesn’t work that way. Enough voters, it is feared, are not ready.”

And blame Hillary Clinton for that, too, having so disastrously overreached with health-care reform. “Everybody learned a lesson from that. It’s not good to be too political as a first lady,” said Dr. Caroli. (The PR disaster was compounded by Mrs. Clinton’s maelstrom of press over everything from Whitewater to her ever-evolving hairdo, and the fact that her ambitions for a time outpaced her political talent.)

The result: Hillary entered the East Wing as a full-throated political player and left as a Vogue cover-girl and hostess.

“Hillary’s trajectory was the opposite of Michelle’s,” noted Rebecca Traister, the author of Big Girls Don’t Cry, a book about women and the 2008 election.

As for Ms. Obama, the conservative blogosphere still lights up with outrage whenever the healthy-eating crusader is seen nibbling a French fry, but the first lady’s childhood-obesity-prevention campaign Let’s Move and her advocacy on behalf of military families are not exactly Hillarycare. As Ms. Kantor noted, “There’s the question with Let’s Move about how aggressive and confrontational she was willing to be when it came to taking on corporate interests. With the military families initiative, is it rah-rah patriotic, or does it get into darker material? I’m curious to see how complete and thorough a conversation she wants to have with the country about the issues veterans face.”

In the first term, Mrs. Obama’s “mom-in-chief” moniker, derided by the left, allowed her to occupy an apolitical space. “There was some frustration among women, thinking she should do more,” said Anita McBride, former chief of staff to Laura Bush and a scholar of the history of first ladies. “But the women’s movement is about choice, and this was her choice.”

Others agree that Ms. Obama’s old-school approach during the first term was in itself somewhat radical. “I consider myself a feminist,” noted MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry. “But I’m also a critic of second-wave feminism, which was bourgeois, white middle class, and said that work done outside the home is the most liberating kind of work. That ignores the fact that through vast periods of U.S. history, black women were not provided the income or space that they could make that decision. I find it kind of subversive and interesting that a black woman with a law degree from Harvard who’d been the primary breadwinner through college said, ‘I’m going to do what generations of white women have done, do the Junior League kind of work.’”

But even Dr. Harris-Perry sees an untapped political potential in the first lady. She cited Ms. Obama’s work negotiating between the University of Chicago and the city’s South Side: “It’d be really interesting to see if she could navigate that at a higher level—bridging this gap between the powerful and well-resourced and those that are being denigrated.”

Besides, a certain distaste for politics might just turn out to be an asset, creating a sense that, should she venture into the arena, she would be doing it not because she wants to—heaven forbid—but because her country truly needs her. A “Michelle Obama 2016” T-shirt with a snazzy stars-and-bars design can be found for about $25 on Google Shopping.

Ms. Traister compared Michelle to another formerly nonpolitical person who ended up taking out a sitting Republican senator. “Elizabeth Warren is somebody who did not have a political career, who was tremendously influential in terms of how we see the chasm between rich and poor,” Ms. Traister noted. Ms. Obama, she said, “could get very active in immigration reform, she could start talking about climate change.”

Dr. Harris-Perry had a different role model in mind: a first lady who, as “a dutiful soldier,” kept silent about her disagreements with her husband during his presidency but campaigned vociferously as a conscience of the Democratic party in the years that followed: Eleanor Roosevelt. “She became the legacy; she held the Democrats’ feet to the fire. She was very active in party leadership,” Dr. Harris-Perry said, adding that Ms. Obama “might be able to be a kind of queen-maker for women running for office. I could see her on the campaign trail.”

“It’s very natural for that to be the next-step fantasy for people who appreciate her brilliance—oh, she’ll run for office!” Ms. Traister said. “One thing all those who want her to run could think about is other jobs she may want to have in her life, using her own model of working within communities. We need to be aware of is not letting her identity as a former first lady hold her back from having an independent life.”

Then again, you never know. Back in the 1990s, Dr. Caroli predicted that Hillary Clinton would never run for office: “She didn’t look at ease with groups of people,” she said. “But people change!”

And if they don’t, there’s always Sasha and Malia. 2040, perhaps?