Zoé Heller, _What Was She Thinking?_

A REVIEW I read of Heller's latest novel mentioned how good this one was; I took the bait, read it, and I agree -- it's very good.

As we begin, one of the characters, Sheba Hart, is the much-beleaguered center of a scandal; an arts teacher in her mid-30s, married and the mother of two, she has been discovered to have been conducting an affair with one of her teenaged students, Stephen Connolly. Dismissed from her job, dropped by her underage lover, abandoned by her family, hounded by the tabloids, she is being looked after by her friend and fellow teacher, Barbara Covett. Barbara is our narrator, and she embarks on a reconstruction of the affair, told in parallel to the story how she became friends with Sheba.

So, we are in Unreliable-Narrator-Land. As James Wood has pointed out, unreliable narrators actually have to be more reliable than most -- the strategy works only when we can detect that the narrator's account is systematic in its distortions and omissions. Barbara takes a while to sort out, though. Her last name is a clue that there's a streak of envy in the friendship (Heller is obviously not above such Wauvian signal-names: the passionate Sheba is "Hart," the smarmy headmaster of their school "Pabblem"). There is also admiration... resentment... a longing for intimacy... a lust to dominate. Complicated.

For instance, it turns out that Barbara is not only Sheba's last refuge, but also the person who let out her secret. Somewhat impulsively, even somewhat inadvertently, as a way of getting back at a third party for a perceived slight... or does she really want to destroy Sheba? Or does Barbara perhaps intuit that this a way for her to have Sheba to herself?

The novel put me in mind of Mary Gaitskill's two novels, both of which have partly to do with the dangerous waters of friendships between two women, one of whom is attractive and popular, the other of whom is plain, lonely, intelligent. It's easy to see why Sheba would become friends with Barbara, who is the one gleaming intelligence on the school's dull faculty, wickedly witty, a promising candidate for confidante. It's easy to see why Barbara would become friends with the sophisticated, dashing, talented, cosmopolitan new arts teacher. But is it going to matter that Sheba is well-off, with an elite education, an interesting past, a successful husband, a big rambling house, and two kids, while Barbara, dateless for decades, has a flat, a cat, a dispiriting job, and no future prospects for anything but more of the same?

Oh, yes, it is going to matter. And we haven't really gotten to the whole class thing yet. In the truly unnerving final scene, we realize that Barbara has Sheba wholly within her power, and that the prison term Sheba is hoping to avoid may be the better of her two possible outcomes.