What Was She Thinking? (Notes on a Scandal)
Zoe Heller, 2003
Macmillan Picador
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312421991
Summary
More than a decade ago, Kazuo Ishiguro wowed readers with The Remains of the Day, a novel requiring readers to see past the self-deceptions of an uppity English narrator to understand the true significance of the story. In the same vein, Zoe Heller offers a riveting story of friendship, jealousy, and betrayal, with a narrator as unreliable as Ishiguro's infamous butler.
Heller's narrator is Barbara Covett, a British schoolteacher who lives a quiet, solitary life with an aging cat as her sole companion. For reasons she cannot comprehend, Barbara has never been good at making friends. But she is drawn to Sheba, a pretty new pottery teacher, and jealously tries to edge out the other teachers to win Sheba's friendship. When Sheba begins an inappropriate relationship with a young male student, it is Barbara in whom she confides. Soon, Barbara begins a written account of Sheba's illicit affair, detailing the actions of a woman caught in the grip of an obsession larger than herself.
As Barbara continues to infiltrate Sheba's life, their friendship acquires a dangerous undercurrent. And although the book title ostensibly refers to Sheba, readers might ask themselves the same question of Barbara, as this psychologically rich, complex tale unfolds. In penning her wickedly wonderful second novel, Zoe Heller certainly had her head squarely on her shoulders. (From Barnes & Noble.)
The novel was made into the 2006 film, Notes on a Scandal, staring Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett.
Author Bio
• Birth—July 7, 1965
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Oxford,; M.A., Columbia University
• Currently—lives in New York, New York
Zoe Heller was born in London and lives in New York City. She is the author of the novel Everything You Know; What Was She Thinking? and The Believer.
Extras
Excerpts are from a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview:
• My very first job was as a milkman's assistant on an electric milk float in London. (This was in the days when British homeowners got their milk delivered to their front doorsteps. I was 14 at the time. It was an okay job, but the smell of stale milk tended to linger horribly on my clothes.
• I wish I could have been a jazz singer.
• I am extremely fond of manatees.
• When asked about what book influenced her most as a writer, here is her response:
Perhaps Middlemarch by George Eliot? I read it when I was 17 years old and at that time, it seemed to me to be the wisest, most truthful piece of fiction I'd ever read. Eliot's account of her heroine's life is remarkably unsentimental and grown-up. I also loved Eliot's stately, slow narration and her long, windy digressions. It was one of the first books that really made me want to be a writer. (Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble)
Book Reviews
In the end, What Was She Thinking? isn't so much about the standard student-teacher affair as it is about the complicated weights and balances of female friendships. Some of the novel's funniest scenes show the women adopting a posture of honesty and ''supportiveness'' while privately judging or dismissing one another. It's a recognizable snit-fit of ''enough about you, what about me'' that pushes Barbara into her final betrayal. In a way, Barbara risks more for friendship than Sheba does for romance. The plot twist may not be a huge surprise, but Heller handles it with wry grace, managing to mock her characters without allowing their story to tip into farce.
Lisa Zeidner - New York Times
In literature as in life, one of the most dangerous turns of events is to get what you want, and for all its surface tawdriness and chatty asides, What Was She Thinking? achieves some worthy literary aims indeed.
Chris Lehmann - The Washington Post
Barbara Covett, a sixtyish history teacher, is the kind of unmarried-woman-with-cat whose female friends sooner or later decide she is "too intense." Thus when a beautiful new pottery teacher, Sheba Hart — a "wispy novice with a tinkly accent and see-through skirts" - chooses Barbara as a confidante, she is deeply, even rather sinisterly, gratified. Sheba's secret is explosive: married with two kids, she is having an affair with a fifteen-year-old student. The novel, Heller's second, is Barbara's supposedly objective "history" of the affair and its eventual discovery, written furtively while she and her friend are holed up in a borrowed house, waiting for Sheba's court date. Barbara has appointed herself Sheba's "unofficial guardian," protecting her from the salivating tabloids. Equally adroit at satire and at psychological suspense, Heller charts the course of a predatory friendship and demonstrates the lengths to which some people go for human company.
The New Yorker
Subtitled "Notes on a Scandal," Heller's engrossing second novel (after Everything You Know) is actually the story of two inappropriate obsessions-one a consummated affair between a high school teacher and her student, the other a secret passion harbored by a dowdy spinster. Sheba Hart, a new 40ish art teacher at a London school for working-class kids, has been arrested for having a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old student, Steven Connolly. The papers are having a blast. Sheba is herself the object of fascination for her older colleague and defender, Barbara Covett, whose interest in Sheba is not overtly romantic but has an erotic-and at times malevolent-intensity. Barbara narrates the story of Sheba's affair while inadvertently revealing her own obsession and her pivotal role in the scandal. The novel is gripping from start to finish; Heller brings vivid, nuanced characterizations to the racy story. Sheba is upper-class, arty, carelessly beautiful in floaty layers of clothing, with a full life of her own: doting older husband, impossible adolescent daughter, a son with Down's Syndrome, real if underdeveloped talent as a potter. She never got a driver's license, she tells Barbara, because she is always given rides; people want to do things for her. Barbara's respectable maiden-lady exterior hides a bitter soul that feasts on others' real and imagined shortcomings: one colleague's carelessly shaved armpits, another's risible baseball jacket. Even characters on stage for a minute (a Camden barman who hams it up for Barbara) live and breathe. Verdict: Some readers will pass this up as yet another take on the shopworn theme of student/teacher romance, but Heller's light touch will win over others and please reviewers.
Publishers Weekly
Ansay takes us on the dark, emotional journey of a mother's losing a child and brings us out on the other side into forgiveness and redemption. Meg and Rex Van Dorn's comfortable life in Meg's home town on the Wisconsin shore of Lake Michigan ends when their young son is killed in a car accident as Meg is driving him to school. Cindy Ann, the driver who caused the accident, was Meg's best friend in high school. Meg and Rex file a civil suit against Cindy but drop it when they find that bitterness is dominating their lives. Trying to start over, they buy a sailboat and move to the Caribbean. Their seafaring life, which Ansay depicts authentically in all its drudgery and danger, seems exotic but offers them little comfort. In time, Meg's feelings about Cindy evolve into something like a supernatural connection. When she learns that Rex is secretly pursuing the civil suit, the differences in how they cope with grief begin to pull their marriage apart. For all popular fiction collections; buy to please the many fans of Ansay's Oprah selection, Vinegar Hill. —Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ. Libs., Harrisonburg, VA
Library Journal
After Everything You Know (2000) comes the tale of a London art teacher, married with children, who has an affair with a student of 15. When Sheba (Bathsheba) Hart comes to St. George's school, she's completely inexperienced-as clueless about disciplining hormone-driven students as she is about how to dress, inclining toward the sheer, diaphanous, and fey when corduroy or tweed would be in order. More expert, however, is experienced faculty member Barbara Covett-40ish, single, lonely-who casts a cool eye on the exotic Sheba, gradually is drawn closer, and ends up an intimate friend: kind of Wuthering Heights's Nelly Dean to Sheba, making notes, keeping a timeline, and writing a narrative (this novel) of the whole debacle of Sheba's affair. Barbara's tale is often stiff and clumsy ("I daresay we shall never know for certain the exact progress of her romantic attachment"), but it neatly limns the contrast between Barbara's drab, spinsterish life and Sheba's charming, fecund, expansive domesticity, with her academic husband (though he's a snob), and her two healthy children (the older, though, a fiercely troubled teenager and the younger, doted on by Sheba, a victim of Down's syndrome). There's a major disconnect between all of this on the one hand and, on the other, Sheba's letting herself be seduced by the callow working-class Steven Connolly, then continuing the affair for months, keeping it a secret even from Barbara, until inevitable exposure and with it the promise of loss, penalty, breakup, dislocation, perhaps even imprisonment, though the story (wisely) ends with this last yet to come, leaving us only with a powerful sense of the piercing loneliness of Barbara of the inexplicably self-invited ruin of the charming and yet utterly lost Sheba—her family ruined, her future depraved. Unbelievable yet compelling: it's almost as if Heller tried for a salacious potboiler and ended up—her talent refusing not to intrude—with a portrait that remains indelible. Watch for her next, whatever it may be.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. There has traditionally been a taboo on older women/younger men relationships. In the novel, the news media describes the affair between Sheba and Connolly as "despicable" and "unhealthy." Why do you think it has historically been viewed this way, and do you agree?
2. Heller expertly captures the insulating and sometimes claustrophobic atmosphere of academia. Give examples of this, and discuss the differences and similarities between Sheba and Barbara that brought them to teach at the same institution.
3. Connolly's unabashed admiration and innocence prove irresistible to Sheba. How are Connolly's attentions much different from the oglings of her academic colleagues since both indicate that they find her sexually attractive. Why is one so much more flattering?
4. What makes a woman like Sheba behave so irresponsibly? How easy was it for her to risk everything for the danger of the relationship? Does Sheba really think about the consequences of her actions?
5. Why does Sheba's friendship with Sue Hodges seem so ill-founded to Barbara? Why would Sheba choose Sue her as her confidant—she never mentions Connolly's visits to Sue. How does Barbara seduce Sheba away from Sue?
6. Barbara observes that Connolly's overt effort to please Sheba is like "the cynicism of all courtship." Discuss what she means by this.
7. Barbara asks why Sheba insists on seeing Connolly as gifted and extraordinary in a sea of fairly ordinary, untalented students. Does the element of class exacerbate the forbidden nature of the relationship? Is Connolly exploiting this? What is his culpability in the situation?
8. Why, when Barbara seems like such a prim and formal person, is she initially so sympathetic to Sheba's predicament? Why is she not appalled? She says she thinks that Connolly is actually benefiting from the relationship, not being abused by it. Is it her desire for Sheba's friendship or pure feminist support? Does she take vicarious pleasure in it?
9. Sheba is presented throughout the first portion of the book as a very appealing character, seeking few of the advantages her money and class could provide. She bemoans her own lack of ambition. How much do her feelings of insecurity, boredom, and her problems with Polly affect her vulnerability to Connolly?
10. What is Barbara's reaction when she finally finds out about the affair? Is this the cause of her betrayal? Does it lead to her punishment at St. George's? Does Barbara have the right to set down the events in writing? Discuss how their friendship provides as fertile ground for mutual misunderstanding, jealousy, and treachery as does the illicit love affair.
11. At the end which woman is more sympathetic? Is Barbara friend, guardian, foe, jailer, interloper, predator? Is Sheba a victim of circumstances, an understandably bored housewife, or a selfish woman spoiled by privilege?
12. The story is finally about the two women, and the many facets of female friendship. Discuss the ways in which Heller's device of having Barbara tell the story serves to enrich the novel by revealing both women's emotional lives.
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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