Zoe Heller's novel, The Believers, marks her definitive Americanization as a writer. The British journalist has long been familiar to readers of the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, but her biggest claim to fame has been her second novel, the decidedly British What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal, later adapted into a successful film. Now, Heller returns with the tale of the Litvinoffs of New York City, a secular Jewish family thrown into disarray when husband and father Joel, a famous socialist lawyer equally revered and reviled for defending sundry political radicals, falls into a coma following a stroke.
The author’s crisp and witty prose propels the story along as Joel’s wife Audrey and their adult children Rosa, Karla and Lenny grapple with alternately humorous and poignant personal crises. Inventive analogies enrich Heller’s narration without slowing its brisk pace. Months into the coma, “Joel had survived for so long and returned from the brink so many times that they had come to think of death as a rather incompetent adversary—a bungling pantomime villain, wheeled out by the doctors from time to time to give them all a spooky thrill, but always safely vanquished.” And throughout the proceedings, Heller lays bare the inadequacy of the Litvinoffs’ dogmatic socialism, which not only skews certain family members’ political views but also lacks sustenance for those seeking love, spiritual fulfillment or simply a modicum of happiness.
Gawking at a family’s turmoil while simultaneously exposing the deficiencies of their heartfelt ideological convictions seems doubly voyeuristic, a troubling aura The Believers cannot shake.Yet the reader’s discomfort is mitigated to a large degree by the obvious sympathy the author evinces for her characters. (The only partial exception is Audrey, whom Heller very nearly turns into a caricature of the grouchy old leftist.) Even as Heller pillories the ideological rigidity so long a Litvinoff trademark, she sensitively—almost tenderly—probes family members’ turbulent lives and unfulfilling relationships. And in a refreshing display of non-alignment, she pointedly refrains from proffering some other comprehensive belief-system as a replacement for the Litvinoffs’ traditional socialist loyalties. For example, Rosa, who spurns her parents’ leftism and flirts with Orthodox Judaism, finds it difficult to reconcile her emotional affinity for the religion with her intellectual rejection of certain of its precepts.
Indeed, the novel’s strongest suit is the psychological insight it provides into characters agonizing over the best course to chart in life. Heller possesses an uncanny ability to penetrate the conflicted nature of individuals—especially women—undergoing an emotional or ideological transition. Rosa’s lovelorn sister Karla, who suffers from depression and low self-esteem, teeters on the brink of an affair, but continues to feel grateful to her husband for having married an overweight non-entity. Meanwhile, Rosa discovers that her recent abjuration of socialism fails to eradicate a lingering attachment to long-held ideals: “However discredited her former faith, there was a part of her that cherished its memory, that still felt pain when it was mocked. She was not ready to have her story coopted as a conservative fable.”
In a lighter approach to matters psychological, Heller winningly tackles middle-class guilt, providing a rare instance in which Audrey’s image as a harridan is softened by a hint of compunction. How does this inveterate socialist, who lives in an elegant house in exclusive Greenwich Village, comport herself in the presence of the domestic help? “To offset some of the embarrassment of having an elderly Latina scrub her toilets, she usually made sure to be elaborately, importantly busy whenever Sylvia was in the house.”
Of course, the novel’s scarcity of plot can be obscured only for so long; The Believers is essentially an extended slice-of-life piece. And using Joel’s coma to frame the tale arbitrarily begins and ends its most engaging storylines, as neither Rosa’s spiritual quest nor Karla’s extra-marital romance is triggered by Joel’s condition. The complexity of its protagonists carries The Believers. (In fact, in this novel, even the secondary characters shine; Khaled, Karla’s Egyptian-American love interest, proves a welcome departure from the stereotypical Arab of post-9/11 literature and film, in that he is neither a brooding fanatic nor a victim of discrimination.) Heller’s treatment of fraught and contradictory emotions, together with her unabashed exploration of intellectual musings, endows the story’s eponymous believers with an all-too-rare profundity. Hardcore socialist, Orthodox Jewish and everything in between, the intriguing Litvinoffs seldom allow a flimsy plot to detract significantly from their allure.
> The Believers
By Zoe Heller (HarperCollins), 352 pages
