This Week's Reads
photo: Sigrid Estrada
Heller turns LeTourneau into art.
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WHAT WAS SHE THINKING? (NOTES ON A SCANDAL)
By Zoe Heller (Henry Holt, $23)
I don't know much about Zoe Heller, but I bet her old weekly column for London's Sunday Times was pretty wild. After finishing her hilarious, provocative second novel, I'm guessing she's also had some experience with extramarital affairs. Here's how her adulterous heroine, Sheba Hart, defends herself: "[D]oing that kind of thing is easy. You know how you sometimes have another drink even though you know you're going to have a hangover tomorrow? Well, it's like that. You keep saying No, no, no until the moment when you say, Oh bugger it. Yes."
Sheba, a hippie art teacher at a London high school, is shagging one of her 15-year-old studentsbut the simplicity of her defense is precisely why it works. She offers no self-pitying excuses about recapturing her youth or boosting her graying ego. Heller knows that in the second it takes to say, "Bugger it" (or whatever colloquialism applies), careers, families, and entire lives get tossed down the toilet, and you find yourself completely, inappropriatelyand, in Sheba's case, criminallynaked.
Yes, before you ask, Heller has stated in interviews that she was inspired by our own Mary Kay LeTourneau case. But what leads a sensible 42-year-old professional woman to shag her inarticulate pupil in public parks and forest shadows? Thanks to the narration and note taking of her older, wiser, and stodgier colleague, Barbara, we're shown enough of Sheba's unsatisfying family lifeshe's married with two kids, one of them autistic and the other a complete bratto understand why getting into a scandalous affair could be so easy. Because life, before "Bugger it," is a pain in the ass.
More importantly, Heller's deft, humorous, and sympathetic novel is as much about the relationship between Sheba and Barbara as the scandalous affair. Barbara is an excellent characteras good as any I've read in contemporary fictionwho gradually reveals the depth of her own aching loneliness while recounting Sheba's folly. And she, like Sheba, has a craving for companionship that is equally as selfish and all-encompassing.
Though it ends rather flatly, Heller has penned a captivating character study and a thoroughly entertaining tale completely free from schlock and silly excuses. Would that all affairs went so smoothly. LAURA CASSIDY
Zoe Heller will read at Elliott Bay Book Co. (101 S. Main St., 206-624-6600), 7:30 p.m. Thurs., Sept. 4.
WELL
By Matthew McIntosh (Grove Press, $23)
Just as Raymond Carver put obscure Northwest backwaters like Prosser and Toppenish on the literary map, Matthew McIntosh's debut novel, Well, stakes a claim for lowly Federal Way as the rich new locus of unexamined lives. But don't look for his book to show up on any Chamber of Commerce recommended-reading list. As portrayed by 26-year-old native son McIntosh, the good citizens of Federal Way are relentlessly un-well. As one scene ends with a guy retching over a toilet, the next opens at a strip club, the next with a guy hitting his head on the bottom of a pool, the next offers a coupla junkies philosophizing, followed by a woman excitedly ringing up the Poison Control Center to identify the pills she just found in the sofa.
To capture broken, fragmented lives, McIntosh opts for a broken, fragmented style. Well is built from an irregular mosaic of literary shardsshort scenes and portraits, monologues, a long string of characters introduced one after the other, none of them ever to recur after their brief moment on the stage. He thwarts our wish to become more involved with these people (just as they're incapable of making lasting attachments to one other). Declaring his book a novel is like an act of defiance and, certainly, hubris. What of those critics who've knocked the author's refusal to offer sustained character or plot development? In a recent interview on a British literary Web site Bookmunch, McIntosh dismisses those who cling to novelistic conventions: "A lot of these people should be retiring soon," he airily observes.
Unlike so many young writers, McIntosh, who graduated from the UW and now lives in San Francisco, is neither blatantly autobiographical in his work nor caught up in his own generational obsessions. Indeed he's downright heroicand, much of the time, brilliantly convincingin his efforts to inhabit (however briefly) the minds of a huge cast of sad Federal Way ne'er-do-wells: a middle-aged man with terminal cancer; a 35-year-old lonely gay bartender with a drinking problem; a 17-year-old Korean high-school drop-out doing every drug she can grab; a great-grandmother hoping for a quick death; a disturbed high-school kid stalking a female classmate; a host of aging, frustrated, blue-collar men; even (in a bizarre, not terribly successful detour) that insane guy who forced a Metro bus off the Aurora Bridge a few years ago.
Yet a few of these portraits are connected by a kind of internal web. The penultimate piece, "The Border," examines the impact of a man's suicide on a dozen different characters to whom he was variously connected; while the opening piece, "Burlesque," captures the strained relationships among a half-dozen Federal Wayers for whom that evening's Sonics game serves as a focus and metaphor for deeper aspirations. (Need I say the Supes lose?) There's an underlying emotional tissue of anger, mental derangement, and hunger for escapeas well as regular visits to the local bar, the Trolleythat McInstosh captures with brute, eloquent compassion. While the tone and diction remain fairly constant (a familiar, vivid sort of Carver-esque vernacular), somehow McIntosh manages to make the disparate characters distinct. And he does so without a hint of slumming false fellowship. That someone so young, and so promising, can so sensitively depict the disappointments of crushed midlife is impressive.
