Zoe Heller crafts incisive and provocative novels that tackle the complexities of human relationships and moral quandaries with unflinching honesty. Her stylistic dexterity and keen insight into character psychology reveal the darker aspects of human nature. Heller masterfully employs irony and dark humor to explore themes of obsession, betrayal, and the search for identity. Her works are both unsettling and profoundly compelling.
After civil rights attorney Joel Litvinoff suffers a stroke, his contentious family struggles with the consolations of faith and the trials of doubt as they battle their own demons and each other, as every member is called upon to decide what, if anything, they still believe in
When New York radical lawyer Joel Litvinoff falls gravely ill, his wife Audrey uncovers a secret that forces her to re-examine both her belief in him and her commitment to their forty-year marriage. Meanwhile, her ne'er-do-well adopted son, Lenny, is back on drugs again and her daughters, Karla and Rosa, are grappling with their own catastrophes and dilemmas. Rosa, a disillusioned revolutionary socialist, has found herself increasingly beguiled by the world of Orthodox Judaism; now she is being pressed to make a commitment and must decide if she is really ready to forsake all her cherished secular values for a Torah-observant life. Karla, an unhappily married hospital social worker and union activist, falls into a tumultuous affair with a conservative shopkeeper. Can she really love a man whose politics she reviles? And how to choose between a life of duty and principle and her own happiness?
256pages. in8. Broché. Zoe Heller juggles journalism and novel-writing successfully in Notes on a Scandal and manages to say something interesting and complex about moral panics and the people who get caught up in them. Pottery teacher Sheba lets herself be talked into an affair with 15-year-old pupil Connolly; part of what is admirable about this novel is that there is no real attempt to extenuate this-it's wrong and she knows this from the start, enough to lie to herself and others about it. It's an abuse of her very limited power-he is one of the few of her pupils interested in art, not interested in perpetually disrupting her lessons. Sheba is not alone in abusing power, though, and Heller forces us to confront this unpleasant truth about the moralising, managerial headmaster, the husband freed by Sheba's action to seduce his own very slightly older students, and the relatives who never liked her much and can now disown her. Above all, she devotes most of the novel to Barbara, the older colleague who becomes Sheba's confidante and slowly manipulates the situation to make Sheba entirely dependent on her. This is a brilliantly gloomy study in obsession-and the obsession in question is not actually Sheba's with her underage lover. -Roz Kaveney
Schoolteacher Barbara Covett has led a solitary life until Sheba Hart, the new art teacher at St. George's, befriends her. But even as their relationship develops, so too does another: Sheba has begun an illicit affair with an underage male student. When the scandal turns into a media circus, Barbara decides to write an account in her friend's defense—and ends up revealing not only Sheba's secrets, but also her own.
From the first day that the beguiling Sheba Hart joins the staff of St George's, history teacher Barbara Covett is convinced that she has found a kindred spirit. Barbara's loyalty to her new friend is passionate and unstinting and when Sheba is discovered to be having an illicit affair with one of her young pupils. Barbara quickly elects herself as Sheba's chief defender. But all is not as it first seems in this dark story and, as Sheba will soon discover, a friend can be just as treacherous as any lover.
Willy Muller's relationships with women are complicated. His girlfriend Penny pushes him to address his personal space issues, while Karen seeks more intimacy. His daughter Sophie wants financial support for her husband's drug habit, but it's his youngest daughter Sadie who is causing him the most stress.