Notes on a Scandal: What Was She Thinking?

Zoe Heller
Published 2003
Picador Fiction
259 pages

You never appreciate what a compost your memory is until you start trying to smooth past events into a rational sequence.

The subtitle of Notes on a Scandal: What Was She Thinking? really describes the objective of the book - to attempt to unravel a thought process that is difficult, maybe even impossible, to fully comprehend. Rather than a suspenseful, edge-of-the-seat tale of scandal, the book is slow and contemplative; the whole idea revolving around that effort to crawl into the head of someone who committed an illegal act but somehow managed to justify it to herself, in order to figure out what on earth she was thinking.

Barbara is a loner, not particularly attractive but not ugly, either. Still, she's a very solitary person and it excites her when the beautiful new teacher at St. George's school, Sheba Hart, begins to reach out to Barbara and a friendship blossoms. Early in their friendship, Sheba poses a "hypothetical" question about the attraction of a young, male student by the name of Steven Connelly. Barbara tells Sheba very firmly to put a stop to Connelly's advances and report him to the headmaster. Sheba says she couldn't possibly have him punished for having a crush on her and says nothing further. But, later, it becomes obvious to Barbara that even at that time, Sheba was covering up the truth, possibly trying to get Barbara to help her justify her actions.

It is irritating when Sheba talks this way - as if she were a passive victim of fate, rather than the principal architect of her own suffering.

The reader knows, at the beginning of the book, that Sheba has been caught in a scandal, that her affair with a 15-year-old boy has been discovered and the press has exaggerated the story. The book is not only an examination of Sheba's reasoning, but also Barbara's attempt to logically order events, to explain how the affair came into being. That the press has distorted the issue in many ways is plainly stated. It's also obvious there will be no great, explosive ending. Sheba has been arrested and kicked out of her home; she'll undoubtedly go to jail and is too disconsolate to do anything dramatic in order to attempt to save herself. Notes on a Scandal is a quiet, pensive book that delves into the personalities involved. The narrator comes to her own conclusion, but the author still leaves room for her reader to decide for his or herself.

There was a tense silence for a moment or so, which was broken by Richard saying, “It’s difficult isn’t it, Barbara? One pretends that manners are the formalization of basic kindness and consideration, but a great deal of the time they’re simply aesthetics dressed up as moral principles, aren’t they?” . . .

I rather thought that he was a pretentious fool, but I kept that to myself.