Six Degrees of Separation: From Notes on a Scandal to The Heir

It’s not often that I’ve read the starting book for the regular meme of a Six Degrees of Separation post (from Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best) – but, when the stars align, I can’t resist joining in. As Kate says – ‘Start at the same place as other wonderful readers, add six books, and see where you end up.

Starting book: This month, things kick off with Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller. It was published in 2003, and for a while it was the book that every book group had to read – that’s where I read it. It tells of an affair between a female schoolteacher and a teenage boy, told from the perspective of an older schoolteacher who is a little prurient, and a lot possessive and lonely. It’s a tour de force.

1st degree of separation: One of Judi Dench’s Oscar nominations came for playing the older schoolteacher in the 2006 film of Notes on a Scandal – so my next choice is another role she got an Oscar nomination for (and, for my money, her best performance): Iris, based on Iris by John Bayley. It’s a biography of Iris Murdoch by her husband. It faced some criticism for exposing Iris Murdoch when she couldn’t give informed consent, but I think it is done with affection and courage.

2nd degree of separation: A Writer’s Diary by Virginia Woolf has also attracted some criticism over the years – not for what Virginia Woolf wrote, but because it was edited by her husband Leonard. It’s all the diary entries that deal with writing from a much larger series of diaries (which has since been published in five volumes, unabridged). I can see why people thought Leonard was editorialising too much, but I think A Writer’s Diary is an extraordinary work. Woolf’s insights into writing are little short of miraculous, and her parallel preoccupation with external validation (and financial success) are a reminder that artistic genius doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

3rd degree of separation: You could go in any number of directions from Virginia Woolf, but I’m going to go for a novel that is also preoccupied with how novels are evaluated – how they are received by critics and by different echelons of the public: Keeping Up Appearances by Rose Macaulay. One of the main characters is a writer of low-to-middlebrow novels, who is fascinated by the way she is adored by some parts of society, ignored by others, and with seemingly no way to objectively determine quality.

4th degree of separation: Keeping Up Appearances got me thinking about novels about sisters who take different paths from each other – and that, in turn, got me thinking about The Easter Parade by Richard Yates. In it, we watch Emily and Sarah Grimes grow up, both drawn beautifully by Yates but both, as we are warned in the opening line, ‘Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents’ divorce.’

5th degree of separation: I’ve gone with another book that tells you in the opening lines that the book won’t have a happy outcome. This memoir (or heavily autobiographical novel) opens ‘This is a cautionary tale, and true. Never fall in love with a house. The one we fell in love with wasn’t even ours. If she had been, she would have ruined us just the same.’ And the book is the brilliant A House in the Country by Ruth Adam – which is much more amusing than the Yates, or than the opening line might make you think.

6th degree of separation: And finally – a book where someone falls in love with an enormous house against their better judgement, though this story turns out more better: it’s Vita Sackville-West’s beautiful novella The Heir, inspired by love for her ancestral home Knowle (which, as a woman, she could not inherit).

What fun!