Customer Reviews

The Believers: A Novel

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

No one creates the annoying protagonist as deliciously well as Zoe Heller. I adored "Notes on a Scandal" and "Everything You Know" so I pre-ordered her latest novel and she does not disappoint. In "The Believers" Ms. Heller provides one of the most annoyingly self-righteous, mean-spirited, morally void, intellectually pedantic, shrew in her main character, Audrey. Just when you think she couldn't get any worse, she does. This novel is a delight. How fun to watch Heller put a pin in the over-inflated buffoonery of ideologues.

Now, a lot of readers prefer their characters to be in black or white; saints or villains. Heller novels are not for these readers; if you must identify with and "root" for a character when you read a novel, skip this one.

But if you appreciate a juicy satire full of complex characters, intellectual contradictions and disturbing choices, you're sure to enjoy "The Believers" as much as I did.

When ultra-liberal defense attorney Joel Litvinoff succumbs to a stroke, falling into a coma, his family is burdened with all the sorrows and anxieties that usually accompany such misfortunes. But the Litvinoff "tribe" is anything but typical. There's wife Audrey, the waspish, strident English ex-pat who viewed motherhood as a distraction, and first child Rosa, who is struggling rather blindly to live up to her parents' socialist principles. Karla is the second-born, beaten down to self-loathing by her upbringing, her husband, and her chronic weight problem. Finally, Lenny, adopted (read "rescued") at age 4, the only one who stimulates Audrey's maternal feelings, and the poster child for learned helplessness. The three Litvinoff siblings are in their 30's now.

The Believers is a character-driven satire of a novel, written with psychological insight and, at times, biting humor. Author Heller displays a fine mastery of dialog, wit, and irony. There is not a single extraneous word between these covers. The Litvinoffs, among themselves, have enough emotional problems to support an army of mental health workers. No one, no matter how loved, is spared the vitriol of Audrey's zingers, and gradually, the wellspring of her bitterness reveals itself. While it is often uncomfortable to read about their inner turmoil, injections of sanity are provided by supporting characters, most notably Audrey's friend Jean and mother-in-law Hannah, and Karla's friend Khaled. Heller makes the uneasiness well worthwhile with a brilliant, authentic ending. Perhaps she'll write more about these people; I certainly hope that's the case.

Zoe Heller is sui generis, a gutsy, peerless writer with master control of her narrative. This is a family saga that takes no prisoners. Her sardonic style is crisp, erudite. Her characters are not caricatures--as outrageous as they are, they feel true.

Audrey Litvinoff, the matriarch, is a flinty, pained woman with a major character disorder. While her husband lies in a coma, she is told some uncomfortable news about his dirty little secrets. With a kind of acerbic, acid aplomb, she spins into a denial that threatens to unravel her. As it is, she is wound so tight that I felt my own circulation threatening to block off. But she is so exuberant that I was often reeling in her energy. She is staggered by her own wretchedness and projects it onto those around her. She is especially harsh to her own daughters, but overprotects and enables her drug-addicted son.

Her daughters, Karla and Rosa, are choked by their mother's dominance and have no sense of their own identity. Karla lives in her husband's shadow and Rosa seeks a self through Orthodox Judaism. Audrey's son, Lenny, could be reductively defined as a spoiled, angry brat. He is certainly a lost soul--a weak, spineless, selfish son of his mother (although he was adopted).

Heller's prose is so muscular it punctures the air, it leaves streaks of blood on your fingers as you turn the pages. I had an out and out blast reading this novel. It is lofty, but wet and juicy and wholly entertaining. The pages flowed with as much alacrity as her narrative. It nearly singed my fingers.

This is my first Heller novel. Some reviewers complain that her characters are not likable. Well, paradoxically, I don't necessarily like a character that is likable. I like them vivid and buzzing and original. Audrey leaps out of the novel and claws your face--and I still had empathy for her. I was moved by her and the events of this story. This is one author that has made a believer out of me.

The prologue of this novel takes place in 1962 with Audrey, an English woman, meeting Joel, an attorney who supports the radical element, at a party in London. Audrey, being considerably younger than Joel, is a bit in awe of Joel's accomplishments and associations. Joel, being almost completely self absorbed, is appreciative of her appreciation. They wander into an odd meeting with her family and then into an even odder agreement to marry.

Part one of the book picks up in 2002, in New York City. Audrey and Joel have been married for 40 years, they have two natural daughters and one adoptive son. Every member of the family is dysfunction. Audrey has turned into a shrew. She is the hanger-on harpy wife of "the great man". Joel has aged but not evolved, taking cases to bask in the reflective loathing generated by his clients. Their eldest daughter, Karla, is a physical and psychological marshmallow. Absorbing abuse from her mother and husband and self medicating with food. The beautiful youngest daughter, Rosa, is a one-time revolutionary, who has fallen out of love with the Marxist cause and is drawn to Orthodox Judaism to find another. Finally, the youngest son, Lenny, is a drug abusing, woman charming, manipulative sponge.

For better or worse, Joel is the lynch pin of the family unit, When he is felled by a stroke and becomes comatose the family members must go on with out his magnetic presence. Parts two and three deal with the initial upheaval and we watch each of the main characters attempt to define who they are going forward. Audrey sinks into bitterness and bile, enabling Lenny's addictions. Rosa is propelled/repelled by the tenets of Orthodox Judaism. And Karla, after an encounter with a chance met stranger, questions her identity and value.

Audrey, and to a lesser extent, Rosa are difficult to warm up to. The author of this book has stated that she does think it is necessary for the reader to like her characters and she makes no attempt to soften their edges. Audrey is compelling in her vitrole. It sustains her while degrading everyone else. The only real sympathy we feel for Rosa comes when she interacts with Audrey. We watch her make judgements and choices and contemplate how much is in reaction to her mother. Karla is a less complex character, her issues have been explored before, in other works and in other venues. We get what has happened to this woman and root for her to get where she clearly needs to go. (I am intentionally leaving the pieces that comprise Lenny's story out - by this point it is clear that Lenny is around mainly for the other characters to react to.)

There are a number of other secondary characters who are engaging and add interest to the story. (My personal favorite was the loopy, well intentioned and long suffering neighbor friend, Jean.)

I won't go into Part four of the book in too much detail other than to say that most of the storylines are wrapped up in a disappointingly predictable fashion. The first three quarters of the book are vastly superior to the end.

Excellent characterizations, interesting world view and solid story telling.

Hyperactivist parents, the father, Joel, a defender of terrorists and leftists, and his wife Audrey, a strident, politically inflexible true believer, are at the center of this story of a floating family seeking ballast. Karla, a plump married social worker, is the least loved of Joel and Audrey's three children, constantly picked on by her mother, and yet she clings to the family and staunchly defends her mother's cruelty. Karla is in a loveless marriage and filled with self disgust at her body, believing she is unlovable, until she is approached by an Egyptian newstand owner who shows her otherwise. Rosa turns from a disappointing commitment to the Cuban revolution to a growing interest in Orthodox Judaism. Though some of the practices and beliefs are difficult for her to incorporate into her existing life and belief system, she takes successive steps to immerse herself in a life her parents reject unequivocably, since they themselves have, as the author puts it, "some ancestral tie" to the religion. If only she had taken up Buddhism or Hinduism, laments her shocked mother. But Judaism? Finally, there is the adoptive ne'er do well son Lenny, a drug addict and scrounger. He has failed 100 rehab programs. He is the only child Audrey loves; for her daughters she never was able to summon much maternal sympathy, and she shamelessly enables his addiction. Audrey as you may see is a most obnoxious character. Rosa, despite her search for a meaningful life, is not very pleasant, either, rejecting people out of hand. Rosa devotes her working life to a club for inner city girls, where the girls are told over and over they are "special". Rosa knows the girls are "resolutely unspecial" and that they are being sold a bill of goods. In fact, this novel is about people who are being fooled and people who are fooling them, and people who are deceiving themselves. Zoe Heller is a superb writer, she has bite and edge and a keen eye for character flaws. She could have had an expert go over the Orthodox Jewish scenes more carefully -there are a number of jarring errors. The religious women awaiting the men's return from synagogue Friday night would not be drinking lemonade - one does not eat or drink from sundown to kiddush on Friday night. But there are some subtle touches, for example in the first chapter when Joel meets Audrey's parents. Joel assumes the Polish parents and Audrey are speaking Polish together. This shows Joel's utter alienation from all European Jewish roots, that he doesn't even recognize the language of Eastern European Jews, which is Yiddish. Polish Jews would never speak Polish together, and I'm sure Zoe Heller knows that. The author has produced a highly interesting, literate, skillfully woven multipart tale. I was most intrigued by the story of Rosa, who comes to the realization that the underprivileged children she has been trying to save are unsalvageable, and she turns closer to Orthodox Judaism to find a more meaningful way of living.

I loved this book and everything about it. The prose glides with grace, and Zoe Heller's characters are so true to life. This is charismatic reading at its best. The strange [or not so strange] thing is that I never truly entered the Litvinoff's home, but I carefully observed every one of the main character's activities. I revisited the West Side of Manhattan and was reminded of what life may be like there.

Fortify yourselves before meeting Audrey and Joel Litvinoff. They are left-wing liberals and seem to believe in their causes. Naturally, speak to your physician first, and then take some B Complex, Vitamin C and all the immunity-fighting vitamins you are able to tolerate. Believe me, I know these people. I really do!

The `Audreys' on the West Side have the ability to skewer you. They guess your weight, measure your dress size, judge your tastes, and usually have biting wits. If one wants to be entertained, one generally will dine with these people.

When the reader becomes familiar with Audrey, Rosa. Karla, and Lenny, Joel has been felled by a series of Cardio-Vascular Accidents. We come to know Joel, for the most part, through the women in his life. There is Audrey - there is always Audrey. Then, there are the two daughters Rosa and Karla. Rosa is seeking her roots while Karla is, also, on a journey of her own. Lenny, well, Lenny appears to try to stay 'clean.'

There was an almost tender moment between Audrey and Karla that is embedded in my memory. Audrey makes one statement to Karla and with this one statement, Audrey redeems herself. I could have reached into this book and hugged her! Sometimes, Mothers do know what they are talking about. I am purposely not stating too much. Future readers should really read this with knowing as little as possible. Suffice it to state that the reader will be in the hands of a master storyteller.

I highly recommend this intelligent book. It is filled with pathos, as well as how people may become bonded to their intellectual pursuits.

I've read all the reviews and can only say that I loved the book. I don't get to read much for pleasure because I have to read so much for work, as in proofread, not fun reading. I just sent it to my mom to read. She's 84. I wonder if she'll speak to me again because I am sure she'll think that I am connecting Audrey to her behavior, past and present. But she's my only mother and you deal. Dysfunctional family? Isn't every family dysfunctional?

If I only have time to read a few pleasure books a year, I am glad my hubby gave me this one to read. Hmmm...maybe I should take something from that also, she writes, while smiling.

The Prologue is set in London in 1962. I found it both unconvincing and could find no relevance to the rest of the book, which is set in New York in 2002. The central characters are the Jewish Litvinoff family: Joel, a radical lawyer; his English-born wife Audrey, even more left-wing than he is; their two daughters Rosa and Karla; and their adopted son Lenny.

These are all very well drawn. Joel is likeable; but for most of the book he is in a coma in hospital. Audrey, now 59, is rude, foul-mouthed and irascible; her one redeeming feature seems to me to be her love for her husband and, inexplicably, for the 34 year-old drug-addicted Lenny. She certainly does not extend any affection to her own daughters, who are at the receiving end of continuous criticism and wounding remarks; she is so intolerably unpleasant that one wonders what her friend Jean can possibly see in her. Karla, in a loveless marriage, is unhappy, overweight and obsessively placatory. Rosa, who has a good deal of her mother's truculence, has lost her belief in the family socialism and, to the disgust of her ferociously secular parents, is looking for a new identity by learning about orthodox Judaism, though she resists much of what her teachers (with considerable eloquence) tell her about the value of what to her is the absurdity of orthodox rituals.

The story reads easily and sustains one's interest throughout; Heller writes beautifully; her observations are sharp and often witty; the frequently abrasive dialogues are dynamic; and at the very end all those unhappy characters seem to have found something that gives their lives some meaning.

Heller's book comes highly praised. I read it in great anticipation, but grew disappointed very quickly. It is incredible to me that Heller should be compared to the finest writers of her generation. This piece strikes me as barely worthy of reading to the end. It is thin and shrill and "true." I quite like the author's subject matter. She has zeroed in on territory few Americans would dare consider. It took guts to delve into the 1960s Jewish left. Americans stay away because the left of today is still controlled by the left of yesterday. An American author would be made to pay for exposing a Greenwich Village lefty lawyer as an adulterous hypocrite and his wife as a violent, hysterical control freak. Heller is to be commended not only for her subject matter but for her wit and shrewd insights. I guess the problem is that the characters are so poorly developed. The lawyer himself drops out of the picture quickly and exists only as a figment of other people's memories. He is essentially a public figure even for his family. When the wife learns that he always loved another woman who bore his child, she becomes cartoonishly hysterical, physically violent. Quickly we see her lashing out at her own children, exposing herself not only as an unstable figure but as a totally ignorant, unsophisticated woman whose inability, for example, to see the benefit to her son, a drug addict, of an extended visit away from his circle of druggy friends, shows to what depths she has grown a stranger to reality. Heller's greatest contribution is her exposure of the hypocrisy of the entire family's comfortable life in a Greenwich Village mansion bought along with the mistress's apartment on lawyer fees drawn from the stars of leftist "rage." It's a shabby world exposed well, but the writing and the execution is Harold Robbins with British wit.

I ransacked this novel long and hard to find anything resembling a sympathetic character. Finally I did: Joel, who comes across as pretty supercilious in the prologue, but fortunately is felled by a stroke on page 33 of this 335-page snarkfest, leaving him mercifully immune to the invective and ill feelings that permeate the remaining pages.

OK, I understand this book is alleged by numerous reviewers to be not just satiric, but brilliantly so. It strikes me more as a soap opera that would never make it past the FCC. It's not that I dislike snark; quite the contrary. But I prefer it to be at least an order of magnitude more elegantly done. I certainly wouldn't want any of this family to be part of my actual life; there's precious few redeeming qualities amongst the lot of 'em, and life's too short to have to tolerate their cramped, bitter natures. Thank God I'm a speed reader and was able to digest this book in a single, sour, dyspeptic lump.

Well, let's be charitable where it's due -- I really ought to exempt Jean. To her credit, she's a peripheral figure for the greater part of the book. I say "to her credit" because apparently the Litvinoffs' nastiness is infectious, and geographic distance is therefore her saving grace. Living in "Bumf**k, Pennsylvania" renders her immune to the bile that permeates the atmosphere east of Heller's Hudson.

But I certainly can't cut any slack for the other minor characters. The Caucasians all share the same jaundiced attributes as the wrangling Litvinoffs. The rest are nothing more than slovenly-sketched ethnics, offensively caricatured.

The portion having to do with religion is focused on Nora's schizoid approach-retreat-approach to a Lubavitcher brand of Orthodox Judaism. This subplot, interestingly, has resonant echoes in Rebecca Goldstein's more recent "36 Arguments for the Existence of God" -- but at least in "36 Arguments" there's a reason for it being there.

I was particularly amused (albeit despite the author's intentions, I'm sure) by the tone-deaf descriptions of the use and effects of cannabis. In one place the characters note that they're smoking a joint of "some really good weed -- Lebanese!" Lebanese is a term universally associated with hashish, which does indeed come from Lebanese cannabis. But the leafy/buddy material itself never makes it past the borders of Lebanon. In another place Audrey's described as smoking a joint, then immediately afterward utterly refusing an offer of her favorite snack sandwiches, and being even nastier than usual. Maybe it was laced with meth?

Equally telling, in this regard, is the author's quoting the entirety of the Serenity Prayer and referring to it as the first "verse" of the Serenity Prayer, as if prayers had verses, and as if she had even the slightest familiarity with this one to begin with.

Don't get me wrong. If you enjoy dissecting the not-yet-quite-dead with rusty scythes, you may well find this novel to your liking. And I actually found one worthy line in it, where Audrey expresses regret at having stayed up late, a few days before Joel's stroke, to read Noam Chomsky's book on 9/11 rather than hopping into the sack with Joel: "How terrible to have missed what might be her last chance to make love to Joel -- for Chomsky!" I'll allow this book an extra star, simply because reading Chomsky did in fact cause her to miss her last lovemaking opportunity -- thereby sparing the reader any description of it.