Matthew Weiner’s ‘Heather’ is a little mad
Matthew Weiner’s debut novel, Heather, the Totality, is creepy, unsettling, violent and queasily seductive.
You expected Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm from the brilliant mind behind AMC’s Mad Men, whose TV writing credits include The Sopranos?
The oddly titled Heather, the Totality (Little, Brown, 144 pp., out of four) is really a novella, told in a fever pitch.
Weiner has explained the spark for Heather: One day on the Upper East Side of New York, he saw an “extremely beautiful” girl of 14 or 15 in a school uniform enter an apartment building that was under construction. A worker (a skinhead) eyed her with “one of the most terrifying looks I have ever seen in my life,” he said. “It was sex and murder and everything all at once.”
What if the girl’s father had witnessed that look? Weiner let his imagination go from there.
The riveting result will fascinate some readers and repel others. Either way, you keep turning the pages as tension and dread steadily mount.
Before Heather arrives on the scene, we meet her parents, Mark and Karen, fortyish New Yorkers who are set up by friends. Mark has a good job in finance; Karen is a freelance publicist in the publishing industry. Mark thinks she’s beautiful. They tick off each other’s emotional boxes (both are lonely, insular people) and marry.
Along comes Heather, who will be their only child. She is beautiful, preternaturally smart, a “miracle” who, by age 5, is capable of “a complex empathy that could be profound.” She’s so perfect she’s almost messianic.
Bobby, who grows up to be the skin- head construction worker, lives in a Polish neighborhood in New Jersey with his single mother, a heroin addict. Bobby will not escape his horrid childhood; it quickly becomes apparent he’s a budding psychopath. He ends up in jail after he assaults a neighborhood girl. His fantasies become more and more twisted.
Bobby is also bright and manipulative; if you were charting out Heather, you’d say he’s the evil yin to Heather’s saintly yang.
By the time Heather is 14, she’s a bit rebellious, an exquisite vision of everything Bobby covets. (The ever-perfect Heather even sports a “C-cup,” a cringeworthy revelation.) As Mark, Bobby and Heather converge, Weiner ratchets up the noirish, Hitchcockian suspense.
There is very little dialogue in the book, which has a tell-not-show narrative that defies convention but mostly works. Weiner’s screenwriter credentials shine brightest in his sharply focused character snapshots. He has the psychological acuity of the best armchair shrink, too.
He crawls inside this little family, following subtle shifts and power plays between husband and wife, between parent and child. After Heather’s birth, Mark “found that Karen and Heather lived as a closed unit and he was on the outside.” But as Heather grows up, Mark discovers she’s a Daddy’s girl, too.
Moments like this make Heather deeper than a mere thriller. You may be reminded of another flawed, troubled, unforgettable family unit: the Drapers.