This weekend, spurred on by Birnbaum’s interview and Maud’s “zealous advocacy” I read Zoe Heller’s What Was She Thinking? [Notes On A Scandal] in one great gulp on the couch. I’d love to do a considered, thoughtful post, which is what the book deserves, but instead only have time to say this:

• In the UK edition, the book was titled simply Notes On a Scandal. When it came out here, its American title, What Was She Thinking?, caused the book to get confused in my mind with Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It.

I mentally placed the book in the chick lit pile, and its plot having a tabloidish edge — a female teacher having an affair with a 15-year-old student — I put it at the bottom of the stack. (I like my chick lit heroines sleeping with older Darcys, not younger hoods, thank you very much.)

Am I the only person who experienced this categorization problem? Who, on hearing that Notes on A Scandal had been nominated for the Booker, reacted with confusion — like, what’s next, Helen Fielding for the Nobel?

• This review-as-cup-of-tepid-tea didn’t help to clear things up.

• Nor did Nick Hornby’s mention of the book in his Believer column (Issue 7). Hornby discarded the novel partway through, after a character, in reference to a football match, tells a teaching colleague that “Arsenal won Liverpool 3-0,” a statement whose verisimilitude off the lips of any Englishman Hornby goes on to decimate. After reading that, he writes, “my dismay and disbelief then led me to question other things, and the fabric of the novel started to unravel a bit.” He goes on to say that “I like Zoe Heller’s writing, and this book has a terrific narrative voice which recalls Alan Bennett’s work; I just wish I wasn’t so picky.”

• For myself, unrealistic soccer dialogue isn’t a deal-breaker, so after picking up the book this weekend, I was able to forge past Hornby’s breaking point.

The same page with the offending bit of soccer talk includes this description of a teacher, as seen through the eyes of a colleague, the novel’s narrator Barbara Covett:

Bangs is a rather pitiful man. He sports a more or less permanent shaving rash, and he is always very, very nervous. Even his most minor conversational sallies have an agonized, over meditated quality, and he tends to pitch his voice one or two uncomfortable decibels above the standard register. Talking to him is rather like attempting to converse with a school play.

• Which leads me to, I think the book’s brilliant — nasty and splendid.

And I think Barbara, who befriends the scandalous, student-shagging Sheba, is a marvelous creation. Without being a rip-off, she reminded me forcibly of Charles Kinbote, the narrator of Pale Fire. (This is strictly a similarity of character type, not one of plot or prose style.) It is a tricky thing to pull off a narrator who is at once a liar, self-deceived and pathetically honest, and Heller does it. And as Kinbote is obsessed with his neighbor John Shade, Barbara is obsessed with her friend Sheba — and the obsession is tinged with similar homoerotic undercurrents, a same charged (& misguided) sense of connection.

One other similarity: As awful as Barbara is, I had the same stabbing affection for her that I do for Kinbote. They’re both lonely fucks, and I can’t help but feel sorry for them. Here’s Barbara at a checkout at a grocery store, on her way home from her first dinner with Sheba’s family:

The man at the checkout watched his things being rung up with careful attention. Back home, he would make his grim tuna sandwich and his cup of sawdust coffee. He would eat in front of the television, as single people do. And then he would turn to his bounteous supply of tissues …. for what? Tears? Sneezes? Masturbation?

There was a small confusion when the girl at the till mistakenly included my milk and bread as part of the man’s basket. “No, no,” the man murmured angrily. Shooting me a nasty look, he grabbed the little metal divider and slammed it down on the conveyor belt to section off my things from his. Lonely people are terrible snobs about one another, I’ve found. They’re afraid that consorting with their own kind will compound their freakishness. That time that [a former friend] Jennifer and I went to Paris together, we saw an airline employee at Heathrow ask two very fat people in the check-in line where they were both off to. The fat people were not a couple as it happened, and the suggestion that they were panicked them. Leaping apart, they both shouted in unison, “We’re not together!”

• The flaw of What Was She Thinking? lies in the ending, which was heavy-handed and called to mind the end of Hannibal when Clarice goes all willing to Lecter. Zoe, I love your novel, but I just do not believe the last four pages.

Also, for the next one, please spruce up your soccer dialogue.