Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller

The unreliable narrator is a useful device in fiction. The haziness that descends over the novel’s events gives plenty of scope for interpretation, and the principal character themselves is often gloriously deluded in the bargain, which is certainly the case with Barbara Covett, a former history teacher in her sixties who is now writing her account of a colleague’s affair with an underage boy.

She begins her notes explaining that she and another former teacher, Sheba Hart, are temporarily living in the house of Sheba’s brother while he is away, and in circumstances somewhat more straightened than Sheba is used to:

I don’t cook anything fancy. Sheba’s appetite isn’t up to much and I’ve never been one for sauces. We eat nursery food mainly. Beans on toast, Welsh rarebit, fish fingers. Sheba leans against the oven and watches me while I work. At a certain point, she usually asks for wine. I have tried to get her to wait until she’s eaten something, but she gets very scratchy when I do that, so these days I tend to give in straightaway and pour her a small glass from the carton in the fridge. You choose your battles. Sheba is a bit of snob about drink and she keeps whining at me to get a grander sort. Something in a bottle, at least, she says. But I continue to buy the cartons. We are on a tight budget these days. And for all her carping, Sheba doesn’t seem to have too much trouble knocking back the cheap stuff.

Barbara then goes on to relate what happened at a comprehensive school where they both taught, how Sheba, a newly started pottery teacher, started an affair with a fifteen-year-old student, destroying her marriage, her career and leading to an impending court case.

Barbara has taken a shine to Sheba from the start, and singles her out as a friend. Sheba confides in Barbara that a boy, Steven Connolly, has made a pass at her, and Barbara tells her in no uncertain terms to put the kibosh on any designs he has. Unfortunately, Sheba finds herself smitten, and an affair begins. There are liaisons al fresco on Hampstead Heath, furtive couplings behind the kiln in her pottery studio, and even, on a couple of occasions, something that might even be called a ‘date’:

At the restaurant in Hammersmith, Connolly apparently requested a sickly cocktail to go with his curry. Sheba suggested he have a soft drink instead, or a lager, but he was insistent: he wanted his rum and Coke. She did not press the matter. She could hardly hector the boy about the dangers of strong drink, she felt, when she was about to take him off the park for sex.

Of course, nothing lasts forever, but the fickleness of teenage boys is particularly notable. Connolly eventually gets bored with Sheba. Sadly, Sheba feels different about the matter and gets distinctly clingy. While her home life is collapsing around her, Connolly is going to parties, doing the usual adolescent stuff:

Sheba had tried to remain cool, but she had kept picturing him at the party, drinking his rum and Coke from a plastic cup, dancing with peachy-skinned girls in slutty dresses.

Meanwhile, Barbara is slowly inveigling herself more and more into Sheba’s life. She decides that Sheba is her best friend now, and when she’s rejected in favour of Connolly, she reacts by hinting to another teacher that Sheba has an unhealthy interest in year 11 boys...

While Sheba spends one last oblivious Christmas and New Year with her family and Sheba sits at home with a full glass and a book (I bought in a bottle of sherry and spent the evening getting slightly sozzled while re-reading Jane Austen’s Persuasion) the word finally gets out, and Sheba’s life is about to spiral into scandal and catastrophe.

How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran

When I was thirteen, I found myself being given a book with a rather serious title along the lines of Your Preparation for Adolescence which dwelt long on the temptation to sin and the perils of marijuana. Seeing as all I learned from it were a few rather outdated slang words for puff, I can’t help but fantasise how things would have turned out had I managed to send this little gem back in time to my thirteenth birthday.

Part memoir, part rant and an attempt to rewrite The Female Eunuch from a bar stool, How to be a Woman is a hilarious amble through subjects both serious and not, that affect women in Britain today, the sort of stuff that people need a few drinks inside them to discuss:

So whilst How to be a Woman is the story of all the times that I – uninformed, underprepared, fatally deluded as to my ability to ‘style out’ a poncho – got being a woman wrong, in the 21st century, merely recounting experience doesn’t seem to be enough any more. Yes, an old-fashioned feminist ‘consciousness raising’ still has enormous value. When the subject turns to abortion, cosmetic intervention, birth, motherhood, sex, love, work, misogyny, fear, or just how you feel in your own skin, women still won’t often tell the truth to each other unless they are very, very drunk. Perhaps the endlessly reported rise in female binge-drinking is simply modern women’s attempt to communicate with each other. Or maybe it is because Sancerre is so very delicious. To be honest, I’ll take bets on either.

She marches through most of the above before getting to marriage; the obscene cost, and the ultimate disappointment of the ceremony itself. She illustrates this with her own nuptials:

I don’t want to exaggerate but, by God, it was a bad wedding... My father is in a suit he shoplifted from Ciro Citterio, and some shoes he shoplifted from Burtons – but he looks calm, wise and not a little emotional about giving away his first child in marriage. “Oh my lovely daughter,” he says, smelling a little of whisky.

Realising she is walking too quickly up the aisle, she slows down to a pace so slow, her sisters suspect that she has cystitis:

Still, I look fine compared to husband to be. He’s so nervous he’s a very pale green, and is shaking like a sock on a washing line. “I’ve never seen a more anxious groom,” the registrar confides, later. “I had to give him two shots of whisky.”

The ceremony over, the guests decamp to the watering hole:

An hour later and everyone’s in the bar. Many of our invited guests haven’t been able to make it, because it’s two days after Christmas and they’re with their families in Scotland, Devon and Ireland. My family are taking advantage of the free bar – many of them can’t walk anymore, and, of the ones that can, two of the have found a memorial to a dead knight, and are giving his statue a ‘saucy’ pole dance.

The reader may now have drawn the conclusion that Caitlin Moran doesn’t do weddings:

I was similarly lacklustre at Cathy and John’s wedding, when Cathy’s dad gave me a tour of their beautiful, all-white house, as I trailed along behind, swigging red wine. “And this is my favourite view,” Cathy’s dad said, as we reached the master bedroom, and he strode over to the window. “On a clear day, you can see right down the valley.” Then a bat flew in through the window, and right into my face. I don’t know if you’ve every had a bat fly into your face, but you don’t have an enormous amount of time to work out your coping technique. You kind of... ride on instinct. My instinct, it turned out, was to scream “WHAT THE FUCKING?”, and hurl my red wine right across the world’s whitest room.

Still, she knows exactly how to rectify the situation:

Bombing into the kitchen, I returned with a bottle of white wine, and started sloshing it around, in a dedicated manner. “White wine gets red wine stains out!” I shouted. “I saw it on telly!” I maniacally started pouring the white wine into the now scarlet rug, and scrubbing it with a tea towel. Cathy’s dad came across the room – slightly faster than I thought a man of his age would be capable of – and gently prised the bottle from my hand. He stared at it – now empty – for a moment. “Ah,” he said, regretfully, “The ’93 Alsace Grand Cru.” There was a long pause. “Still,” he said, with enormous grace, touching the bottle with his fingertips. “It was a little too warm to drink.”

Her feminism is just as important as her humour and Moran tackles her subjects of sexism, motherhood, abortion, role models, weight and adolescence with equal gravity and laughter.

I feel I probably owe the author a bit of an apology, as I’ve never given her much time for her prodigious column writing. I grumbled that most of it wasn’t my thing, (to be objective, that goes for almost all columnists), missing the point that Moran writes well, and is very funny as well as being an excellent polemicist and debater.

I felt almost wistful for my thirteen year old self as I read How to be a Woman, and it is testament to the book’s clarity of thinking that I wish I’d had the chance to read it then. I’m sure it would have helped me muddle through just a little bit better than just knowing that a large weight of cannabis used to be called a brick...

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

I picked this up by accident while looking for something completely different, but as with most of my serendipitous finds, I’m ever grateful for whatever thought process dragged me to the particular shelf in the library that is the home of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.

The goon in question is time, forever beating on the interlinked characters in Egan’s novel which flits from late 70s California, to a dystopian New York in the 2020s. Chronological order is eschewed in favour of themes, her playful prose playing tag with ideas through the book. It begins with Sasha, PA to music mogul Bennie Salazar, who is seeking psychiatric treatment for her kleptomania. Each chapter is a separate vignette, seen through the eyes of another player: Bennie and his friends in a band called The Flaming Dildoes, listening to the Dead Kennedys and playing the punk clubs in San Francisco; Sasha’s friend Rob losing his mind at college in New York; her uncle Ted looking for her a few years earlier when she has run away to Naples...

Ted, a frustrated art history professor who dreams of writing something serious, but never seems to be able to, has been sent by his sister’s new husband to retrieve Sasha from whatever she’s got herself mixed up in and bring her back to the US. He spends each day in Naples wandering around museums, pointedly not looking for her, then going back and ringing his sister to report on his progress. The guilt, along with the realisation that his deliberate freezing of his desire for his wife has destroyed both her sanity and their marriage, is crushing:

After hanging up, Ted went to the minibar and dumped a vodka over ice. He brought drink and phone to the balcony and sat in a white plastic chair, looking down at the Via Partenope and the Bay of Naples.

Ted, in reality, is not much of a drinker:

He seldom drank; booze flung a curtain of exhaustion over his head, robbing him of the two precious hours he had each night – two, maybe three, after dinner with Susan and the boys – in which to think and write about art.

It’s best to put it all to one side, and get back to the serious matter of looking at great art. He sets off the next day to Museo Nazionale to see marbles of Orpheus & Eurydice. On his way back to the hotel, he wanders into the slums of Naples, and runs into Sasha.

It’s all a bit awkward, but he manages to persuade her to come out for supper that evening. She opens up a bit after a second glass of red wine, and they go on to a nightclub:

After a walk of many blocks, they reached a generic looking nightclub whose doorman waved them listlessly inside. By now it was midnight. “Friends of mine own this place,” Sasha said, leading the way into the tumult of bodies, fluorescent purple light, and a beat with all the variety of a jackhammer. Even Ted, no connoisseur of nightclubs, felt the tired familiarity of the scene, yet Sasha seemed enthralled. “Buy me a drink, Uncle Teddy, would you?” she said, pointing at a ghastly concoction at a nearby table. “Like that, with a little umbrella.”

I remember reading this with a palpable terror that something terrible was going to happen; would one of them make a pass at the other, would there be a fight with some of the criminals that she had befriended (we learn from an earlier part of the book that she has dabbled in thieving and prostitution while in Italy, although is this true?) What happens is more understated, but no less devastating:

Anxious, foggy from his own drink, Ted ordered a San Pellegrino at the bar. And only then, as he reached into his wallet and found it gone, did he realize that she’d robbed him.

The fact that Sasha eventually makes good of her life makes little difference. The deed is done, it’s part of her forever now. And even if it could be wiped away and forgotten, there’s still no escaping time’s Goon...

Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters

I recalled a passage in Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet which involved champagne and disaster, that I thought seemed appropriate for the New Year and for the blog, in that order. I last read the book it nearly a decade back, having just read and loved her second book, Affinity. Tipping the Velvet seemed at first to be the lighter book, and it’s obvious that Waters had bloody good fun writing it, but looking back, she’s managed to do more than just create an entertaining Victorian romp. A whole imagined world of lesbian history is intertwined with her sumptuously detailed descriptions of London in the 1890s and her impressive research into gay and lesbian writing of the late nineteenth century; it’s a rather marvellous achievement and also a cracking read.

Nancy, know as Nan, lives with her family in Whitstable, where she works shelling oysters for their restaurant. Captivated by Kitty Butler, a male impersonator who she sees at the local theatre, she becomes close friends with her, taking up an offer to work as her dresser in London. Soon performing as a double act on stage, they become quite famous, with a burgeoning physical relationship growing in secret. Unfortunately, Nan comes back one day to find Kitty in bed with their agent, Walter, and she leaves in a hurry.

Taking to the streets and the grim world of prostitution, going out ‘renting’ dressed as a young man for male clients. It’s here that she runs into Diana, a wealthy widow with a rather outré taste in sex toys. She lives with her for a year, but Diana and her rich, boorish lady friends treat her as little more than an object of titillation and erotic indulgence, and Nan misses Kitty terribly.

After a rather debauched party thrown by Diana for Sapphists Only, Nan has a fight with her after she tries to strip Zena, her maid, in front of her friends. Sent upstairs while the rest of the party continues its drunken whirl, Nan finds herself consoling Zena:

“Just listen to them!” I said, growing bitter again. “Partying like anything! They have forgotten about us, sitting miserably up here...” “Oh, I hope they have!” “Of course they have. We might be doing anything, it wouldn’t matter to them. Why, we might be having a party of our own!” She blew her nose, then giggled. My head gave a sort of tilt. I said: “Zena! Why shouldn’t we have a party, just the two of us! How many bottles of champagne are there left, in the kitchen?”

Her new friend scuttles downstairs and returns with a dewy bottle and a glass straight from the cold store:

I went to her and took the bottle, then peeled away the lead wrapper from its neck. “You’ve shaken it up,” I said. “It’ll go off with a real bang!” She put her hands over her ears, and shut her eyes. I felt the cork squirm in the glass for a second; then it leapt from my fingers, and I gave a yell: “Quick! Quick! Bring a glass!” A creamy fountain of foam had risen from the neck of the bottle, and now drenched my fingers and soaked my legs – I was still, of course, clad in the little white toga. Zena seized the glass from the tray and held it, giggling again, beneath the spurting wine. We went and sat upon the bed, Zena with the glass in her hands, me sipping from the frothing bottle. When she drank, she coughed; but I filled her glass again and said: “Drink up! Just like those cows downstairs.” And she drank, and drank again, until her cheeks were red.

With all those bubbles and emotions, there’s bound to be horseplay. Which there is, but unfortunately Diana and friends come upstairs to check on their charges at a rather inopportune moment...