Zoë Heller: What Was She Thinking? [Notes On A Scandal]

Things are not always as they seem," reads a web site dedicated to Mary Kay Letourneau, the infamous former schoolteacher who was handed a seven-and-a-half-year prison sentence for having sex (and, eventually, two children) with a 13-year-old student. Though Letourneau, the boy, and his mother characterized the relationship as a love affair, the teacher was vilified and exploited by the press, ground into fodder for Larry King Live, Court TV, and a movie-of-the-week. While her actions were irresponsible, even despicable, "child molester" or "rapist" tags aren't adequate, either, because they don't begin to describe the complicated bond that existed between her and the boy–and, in some sense, made them equally culpable. The disparity between moral hysteria and private, unknowable truths lies at the crux of Zoë Heller's witty, incisive second novel What Was She Thinking?, which covers a similar case from a closer distance, although not quite an omniscient one. Making brilliant use of an unreliable narrator, Heller views the affair of 41-year-old pottery teacher Sheba Hart and 15-year-old student Steven Connelly through the jaundiced eye of fellow instructor Barbara Covett, an aging spinster whose sympathies are clouded by her friendship with the accused. Delicately weaving two narrative lines, the scandal and its aftermath, the book is conceived as a work-in-progress, written by Barbara in the tense limbo between Sheba's indictment and her upcoming trial. Doomed to a lonely retirement with her ailing cat Portia, Barbara was aching for a lasting friendship when Sheba, a spirited and attractive middle-aged woman, took over the art classes at a hardscrabble British high school. As Barbara recalls, she became Sheba's close confidant over shared lunches and regular dinner invitations with the latter's upper-middle-class family, including her pompous older husband Richard and their two children, a rebellious 17-year-old and a young boy with Down Syndrome. Only a few months after beginning her tenure at the school, Sheba embarks on her passionate affair with Steven, a problem child whose rugged sweetness awakens the maternal and sexual instincts deadened by her home life. At first, What Was She Thinking? reads like a fair and well-judged attempt to set the record straight, as Barbara tries to counter the public outrage with a levelheaded account of the affair and its repercussions. But soon enough, her own secrets and longings come to the fore, leading to a devastating act of betrayal and the fresh realization that the events have been filtered through Barbara's complex feelings of lust, envy, resentment, and possessiveness toward her friend. Through Heller's ingenious narrative device, Barbara makes herself the real subject of the book, and the facts behind the scandal gradually recede from her grasp.