Review: What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller

What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal] by Zoë Heller
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a dessert-book: delicious, scarfed down too quickly, followed by regret, then an immediate desire for more. It's much more than a confection, but it's just as enjoyable. It's actually a thoughtful, scathing, hilarious, terrifying, intimate character study of two very different women who teach at an English high school, and the relationship that develops between them. A relationship that deepens and intensifies when one of them is caught up in (the titular) scandal.

I'm NOT a big fan of any kind of torture: torture-porn (like the "Saw" movies), torture-comedy (Meet the Parents is the best example I can think of) or actual torture (The Passion of the Christ). This book teeters on the edge of becoming so calamitous as to be torturous, but never falls over that dark ledge. Instead, we are treated to a totally controlled, insane portrait that feels like it shrinks and shrinks until it's like a hit in a movie when a mobster puts plastic over the mark's face and suffocates them. The absolutely perfect tone -- prim, priggish, placid -- belies the wild (psycho) ride being described. Imagine "Gone Girl" being narrated by Mary Poppins.

There's also a lot of phenomenal stuff in here about power and manipulation and sexual double standards and stereotypes and class and love. But really it's such a total pleasure to read from beginning to end that I think any thematic or intellectual takeaways are mere icing on the cake. Having just written a little about the lack of female agency in many of the books I've read recently, the addition of this book definitely alters that particular mix. But aside from my own private lens, the narrative -- tone, voice, mood, etc -- of Heller's writing is pure pleasure.

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