This is what happens when you covet

A female teacher engages in a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old student. This is not exactly a topic that lends itself to humor, but in the hands of Zoe Heller, readers will find biting humor along with social commentary that provokes and makes one squirm. Although the novel (shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize) is over ten years old, its topic is still relevant and the writing is superb.

The novel is told from the point of view of Barbara Covett, a friend of the notorious Sheba Hart. We know from the beginning that Sheba has been in the news for her affair with a 15-year-old student named Steven Connolly. We know that her marriage has broken up and her family shuns her, so that she relies on Barbara to help her get through day by day. We learn about the events leading up to Sheba’s arrest from Barbara’s written account. It begins with Sheba’s first day at St. George’s, where she has been hired as the new pottery teacher. Bathsheba (Sheba) Hart is in her early forties and beautiful, with her “hippie” skirts and long hair done up in a messy bun. She is the daughter of a renowned economist, happily married to an older academic, and has children of her own. She’s “posh” and seems to have it all. Barbara is a 60-something history teacher who has been on the faculty at St. George’s for many years. From the beginning, the reader sees that she is bitter and cynical. She describes St. George’s as, “…the holding pen for Archway’s pubescent proles — the children of the council estates who must fidget and scrap here for a minimum of five years until they can embrace their fates as plumbers and shop assistants.” Barbara has similarly low regard for her fellow teachers at St. George’s, viewing them all as dimwits and social misfits. She has especially unkind words for Sue Hodge, a teacher whom Sheba befriends: “In truth, the early stages of pregnancy had made no discernible difference to Sue’s Pantagruelian bulk. With or without a baby, she was a fatso.” Needless to say, Barbara is friendless. Yet, when Sheba arrives, she senses that they are meant to be friends. “It was an intuited kinship. An unspoken understanding. Does it sound too dramatic to call it spiritual recognition? Owing to our mutual reserve, I understood that it would take time for us to form a friendship.” The thing is, Barbara’s idea of friendship is quite exclusive and proprietary. We learn that a previous “friend” threatened to take out an injunction against her if she didn’t leave her alone. Barbara is more than a little sinister, reminiscent of our unreliable and deranged narrators from The Other Typist, Gone Girl and The Dinner.

As the narrative unfolds, we learn the details of Sheba’s affair as it progressed over the course of a year and Barbara’s bizarre and troubling reaction to it. The details of this part of the plot can’t be given without ruining the story, but along the way, Heller addresses issues related to the affair that would make for some interesting discussion at a book group. For example, Barbara raises the issue of defining the age of childhood versus adulthood and says that in some cultures, once you’ve reached puberty, you are for all intents and purposes an adult. She goes on:

Connolly was officially a minor, and Sheba’s actions were, officially speaking, exploitative; yet any honest assessment of their relationship would have to acknowledge not only that Connolly was acting of his own volition but that he actually wielded more power in the relationship than Sheba.

This segues into musings on the difference between male and female sex offenders. The newspapers have turned Sheba into an object of ridicule, running photos and asking who wouldn’t want to have a go with her, indicating that Connolly was a lucky young man. But if the tables had been turned and it had been an adult man and a 15-year-old girl, there would have been disgust and outrage. Barbara seems to think that not only was Connolly “adult” enough to handle what was happening, but most girls his age would be, too. I suspect many readers would take issue with Barbara on these points, but her thoughts are quite provocative.

I cannot get enough of Heller’s writing. In addition to crafting an intelligent and mesmerizing plot, her way with words is just fabulous. Here are some delightfully politically incorrect observations from Barbara:

Sheba insists that he [Connolly] has superb skin, and it is true, I suppose, that he has been spared the sort of suppurating carbuncles to which boys of his age are prone. 

Poor old Sheba regarded Connolly with much the same amazement and delight as you or I would a monkey who strolled out of the rain forest and asked for a gin and tonic. 

This is my sister’s real attachment to God, I think: the accessories…. She liked the amputees and spastics lining up to be dangled into puddles of holy water. She enjoyed the sing-a-longs and the torchlit processions. But it was the trinkets, the t-shirts, the gewgaws that really popped her cork. It’s a shame, I often think, that Marjorie didn’t end up Catholic. She would have gotten such a charge out of rosary beads. 

What Was She Thinking? is a fascinating novel that exposes the unhealthy obsessions of both of its main characters. The writing is sharp and witty, and the ultimate resolution of the plot is sort of creepy and sad, but perhaps realistic. This would be a good choice for a group.

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