Book review: “Notes on a Scandal”

“When women stop reading, the novel will be dead,” Ian McEwen once wrote. Since women buy an estimated 80 percent of all novels, it’s peculiar how few female protagonists these days are occupied with anything besides overthrowing dystopian dictatorships or pursuing passion with handsome, sexually dominant (but intrinsically nice) billionaires and other similarly mythological beings.

 

Zoe Heller’s second novel, “What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal” (2004), a probing portrait of the toxic bond between two female teachers at an English high school, is a refreshing exception. Ostensibly the book’s topic is as titillating as “50 Shades of Grey”: an affair between brittle high school teacher Bathsheba Hart and a teen-age student. But the relationship the book is really about is the one between Sheba and Barbara, an older colleague who, in the guise of friendship, dominates and ultimately destroys her.

 

The characters could have been written specifically for Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench, both of whom were Oscar-nominated for the 2006 film adaptation. But even if you’ve seen the movie, the book stands up on its own. Heller’s eye for irony and a distinctively English brand of dreariness is unerring. As her yarn unfolds in the form of Barbara’s journal, it becomes clear that Sheba is not the predator she is painted to be in the tabloids once her secrets come to light, but actually the prey of Barbara, whose curdled humanity makes her at once monstrous and pitiable.