The Nerves of Pleasure
What I love about a confessional novel, aside from whatever illegal joy is contained within what’s being confessed, is the succulence. It’s everywhere in Zoë Heller’s second novel, What Was She Thinking?: the “green darkness” of a backyard, the resemblance of clean genitals to “fresh garden vegetables,” the breasts of a woman “riding the raft of her ribs” like “two firm little patties,” the “great beige canopies” of someone’s eyes, the “jagged lumps of rock crystal” some women use for deodorant, the “loose, plump-lipped mouth” of a teenage boy, the “moony ponderings” of a suitor, the scent of a cyclamen tree redolent of “the smell of semen,” the “electric spray” of someone’s hair after the person’s head has been rubbed. At the center of a confessional novel is always some sort of obsession–with a lover, with a crime–and the mark of a good confessional novel isn’t that it aims to explain the central obsession (how can you explain an obsession?) but that it describes the obsessed-about thing with convincing precision.
What Was She Thinking? is a wet, ripe novel whose roundness and weight is compounded because there is more than one obsession at play. The most obvious is 15-year-old student Steve Connolly’s infatuation with a 41-year-old pottery teacher, Sheba Hart. He is the teenager with the “loose, plump-lipped mouth”; she is the woman with the breasts like “two firm little patties”; and it is his hair that rises in an “electric spray” when she rubs his head one innocent afternoon. As she draws her hand away, he says, “Do that again, Miss.” Not much later in the novel, the 41-year-old is bent over behind the pottery kiln and the 15-year-old is asking, “Is it all right if I come in you, Miss?”
Like most confessions, the book begins after the fact–long after that day behind the kiln and well after the scandal has achieved public proportions (this being England, the newspapers go crazy, printing headlines like “Sex Teacher Passes Her Orals with Flying Colours” and “Teacher Takes Keen Interest in the Student Body”). But unlike most confessions, the narrative isn’t told from the perspective of either lover–as you would expect–but from the perspective of the dour Barbara Covett, Sheba’s best friend, who, at one point, eerily pictures her friend the pottery instructor as a “dreamy maiden poised at her wheel, massaging tastefully mottled milk jugs into being.” The subtle success of the novel is that, in her meticulous transcription of minutiae and detail, of the senses and shapes of the story, the narrator betrays an intellectual and sexual obsession with Sheba that is, in its dark and defensive guardedness, more unsettling than the scandal at hand.
Zoë Heller reads from What Was She Thinking? Thurs Sept 4 at Elliott Bay Book Company, 101 S Main St, 624-6600, 7:30 pm.
