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In England, where it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Zoë
Heller's second novel was titled simply NOTES ON A SCANDAL. But her
American publisher, Henry Holt, restyled it WHAT WAS SHE THINKING?
and relegated the drab NOTES to a subtitle.

Such is a rare case when business beats artistry: Heller's original
title is humdrum and unevocative, while WHAT WAS SHE THINKING? is
both colloquial and sensational, a tabloid headline that aptly
captures the novel's tabloid affair.

The American title is all the more fitting because WHAT WAS SHE
THINKING? is an extremely American novel, despite being set in
England. Heller, who wrote about Hollywood and celebrity culture in
her lackluster debut, EVERYTHING YOU KNOW, finds inspiration for
this novel in the 1997 case of Mary Kay Latourneau, a Washington
State teacher who had an affair and two children with a teenage
student.

At the center of the scandal is the obviously named Bathsheba Hart,
a naïve pottery teacher at St. George's Academy in London.
Mobbed by undisciplined teenagers and cowed by teachers' lounge
politics, Sheba befriends a fifteen-year-old remedial student named
Steven Connolly. At first she is drawn to him because he is one of
the few students who does not terrorize her. He has a talent for
drawing, and in several after-school sessions she encourages his
artistic tendencies, exposing him to the work of Degas and Manet.
Soon, however, their relationship leads to trysts behind the
pottery kiln and secret rendezvous in Hampstead Heath.

Their affair and the ensuing media frenzy it ignites are recounted
by Barbara Covett, a lonely history teacher who craves Sheba's
friendship. Barbara is a catty narrator, disdainful of her students
and suspicious of her colleagues, and her observations and petty
critiques of her surroundings are feisty, witty and endlessly
entertaining.

If Heller finds inspiration in U.S. tabloids, she is similarly
fascinated with Vladimir Nabokov, who himself was interested in
America's garish pop culture. She intends Sheba's affair with the
student to suggest a gender-switched LOLITA, and the relationship
between the two teachers mirrors that of the protagonists in PALE
FIRE: Barbara is Charles Kinbote to Sheba's John Shade. She is
ostensibly recording the scandal and defending her friend for
posterity, but in the process she takes center stage. WHAT WAS SHE
THINKING? is less about Sheba's untoward feelings toward a student
than about Barbara's increasing dependence on Sheba as a balm
against her own loneliness and "drip, drip of long-haul,
no-end-in-sight solitude."

Heller plumbs remarkable depths in Barbara's isolation from the
world and in her murky relationship with her coworker. Towards the
end of the novel, Barbara confesses that her response to her
friend's affair and her actions to expose it have been
reprehensible: "If I seem to take particular care in describing how
I came to act as I did, it is not because I hope to exculpate
myself, but rather because I wish to be as rigorously and
unsparingly truthful as possible." Yet, Barbara is at her most
sympathetic when she is at her lowest point. Her actions may be
driven by half-defined desires for Sheba, but Heller delves deep
into her character and makes her fully human.

Of course, WHAT WAS SHE THINKING? cannot live up to its source
material: it lacks the profound inventiveness and meaning of
Nabokov's novels and the real-life scandal of Latourneau's story.
But the novel does have its comparatively modest triumphs. By
letting her narrator outshine the salacious scandal she chronicles,
Heller creates in Barbara a memorable character with a unique
perspective and a resounding voice.