Temporal Reviews: What Was She Thinking? (Notes on a Scandal)

Zoe Heller's bitingly funny "What Was She Thinking?" was short-listed for the Booker Prize - quite rightly so. This is a delicious novel...very subversive. On the surface, it is an account of an all too American phenomenon: teacher seduces underage student. Similar to the Mary Kay LeTourneau incident, the teacher involved is female, and the student is male.

The real story, though, is all about the narration. The novel is narrated by the sexpot teacher's "friend," a spinster teacher who has "be-friended" her, and is attempting to write her story ostensibly to stand up for her character, but we learn much more about the narrator.

The narrator is a cleverly disguised, rather closeted lesbian. She has a habit of taking young female teachers under her wing, in a rather Jamesian ploy of mentoring...really it's a sexless, lustless crush. Barbara Covett's attention, always smothering, is always eventually rejected by the young women.

Reading first person narrative from the POV of a narrator so lacking in self-awareness can be used to evoke pathos, as in Ishiguro's "The Remains of the Day," or to evoke black comedy, as in Vonnegut's "Mother Night." Heller's approach is to head for the black comedy. The extent to which the narrator has built up elaborate explorations in order to avoid dealing with her own sexual identity is quite humorous - especially as she attempts to dissect and analyze the sexuality of her "dear friend" Sheba Hart.

Highly recommended