Books like Notes on a Scandal
—because Barbara Covett’s voice is the real scandal: cultured, funny, wounded and so expertly self-justifying that intimacy with her becomes a form of complicity. These three novels offer similarly dangerous company without merely repeating Heller’s plot.
If you liked Notes on a Scandal, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with Notes on a Scandal, and we tell you exactly what.
Nora Eldridge begins in a state of magnificent fury. A dutiful, outwardly unremarkable schoolteacher, she has spent years being agreeable and overlooked—until her fascination with a glamorous family releases all the thwarted ambition, hunger and resentment beneath that surface.
Like Barbara, Nora speaks with the seductive precision of someone determined to control the record. Messud makes loneliness feel volatile rather than pitiable, and her sentences continually force you to reconsider where sympathy ends and possessiveness begins. The novel’s uncompromising anger famously provoked arguments about whether female narrators must be “likable”; that controversy points to its enduring power. Skip it, and you miss one of contemporary fiction’s fiercest portraits of the rage hidden inside good behaviour.
Spark’s defining novel is a tiny, glittering machine. Miss Brodie chooses a select group of Edinburgh schoolgirls to receive the benefit of her charismatic, highly personal education, while the novel coolly exposes the vanity and danger inside her claim to be acting for their good.
What will delight a Heller reader is Spark’s surgical wit: every compliment may contain a verdict, every act of devotion a seed of betrayal. Her fractured chronology strips away suspense about what happens and replaces it with the more disturbing question of how influence becomes control. Few novels this short have produced such an unforgettable woman—or examined self-dramatizing authority with such merciless elegance.
Freddie Montgomery, cultivated and monstrously articulate, tells us from the outset that he has committed a terrible crime. The question is not whether to believe the facts but whether his gorgeous, fastidious language is confession, camouflage or another form of appetite.
Banville’s Booker-shortlisted novel recreates the unnerving pleasure of listening to Barbara Covett arrange ugliness into immaculate prose. Freddie notices everything except the full reality of other people; his intelligence therefore becomes both his charm and his indictment. Colder and more formally dazzling than Heller, the book is a masterclass in how a narrator can solicit understanding without earning forgiveness. Its voice is the sort that stains the mind long after the final page.