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Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller - Good, but....

This is a good book - well written, but I didn't like it.

Two main characters, both teachers: Sheba, a new member of staff and Barbara, an older, more experienced teacher. An obsessional, manipulative, stereotypical old maid, right down to the cat. She sees Sheba as a new friend and when Sheba confides a secret she finds that she can single her out, cut her off from everyone else and make her totally dependent.

Listed in the 102 Greatest Books by Women:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/ariannarebolini/how-many-of-the-greatest-books-by-women-...
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Sheba, a young and yummy female art teacher in a not marvelous London school begins an affair with one of her (male) pupils, Connolly, and commits the sin of enjoying it despite the fact the boy's an obvious turnip. Disgrace, public humiliation, possibly prison lie at the end of it all, but none of these things matter. The sole clouds on her horizon are her friends among the faculty, the troglodytic Fatty Hodge and the ghastly old spinster Barbara Covett. It's Barbara who's decided to write an account of the whole fiasco, supposedly to help her "friend"; in fact her narrative, which is this novel, is a document that reveals less about Sheba, her motivations and the affair than it does about Barbara herself, in particular her possessiveness, her need to dominate, and possibly (although this is a likely unjustified inference of mine) her suppressed lesbian yearnings for Sheba.

A lot of the time while I was reading this I was reminded of Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, another novel where the commentary is more important than the main narrative, and where the point is the unwitting revealing by the commenter of who the commenter really is. Heller isn't as skilled a player as Nabokov was at this sort of game and isn't up for the kind of narrative trickstery Nabokov managed as if by reflex, and Notes on a Scandal curiously loses out through making fewer and lesser demands on the reader than Pale Fire does; yet there's a huge amount of pleasure -- and a lot of laughter -- to be derived from this book. Notes on a Scandal is unlikely to turn out to be your book of the year, but it could very well turn out to be your book of the month.


ETA: Months later, I've realized that (as have others here) I accidentally linked my review to the screenplay rather than the novel. All the above remarks apply, of course, to the book I read rather than the one I didn't . . .
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Sheba is a new art teacher in a London comprehensive school. Fifteen-year-old Steven Connolly, one of her students, develops a crush on her and, in need of love, she starts a sexual relationship with him. Barbara, another teacher at the school, finds out about it and her jealousy prompts her to report Sheba. ( )