Reviews
The Believers
Zoe Heller
Fig Tree, 306pp
Zoe Heller recently said that one should not necessarily read a novel expecting to encounter nice people. Certainly, one doesn’t meet many of them between the covers of her latest book. The characters are, however, acutely drawn, vivid, and in some cases, formidable. Heller’s greatest gift is for putting herself in the shoes of people who are (one hopes, at least) completely unlike herself, and she achieved this with uncanny believability in Everything You Know and in Notes on a Scandal. Heller examines areas of moral ambiguity through the lens of her characters, immoral or amoral though they might be themselves.
In The Believers, Heller creates a sort of Addams family of US socialists. Audrey and Joel Litvinoff are bright, educated and prosperous, figureheads of the civil rights movement. But when Joel is incapacitated by a stroke three members of his family have to question the values he handed down. The common theme in all their narratives is the conflict between principles and the personal.
As Joel lies ill, his wife Audrey discovers that he was not the man she thought he was. Yet the last 40 years of her life have been shaped by him and lived in his light, so to denounce him is to be forced to redefine herself. She has to decide whether or not she will make the effort to go on believing in his good reputation.
Joel’s daughter Rosa is also experiencing a dissonance: the deprived teenage girls with whom she works have dismal aspirations of which she cannot approve, such as the wish to disport themselves in overly explicit dances on stage. Orthodox Judaism (Judaism being the abandoned religion of her parents) offers her decency and discipline instead. However, it is also hedged by cloying anti-feminist values and by rigid religious rules which are deeply at odds with her liberal background.
Karla is Joel’s other daughter and she is tied to the relentlessly dull Mike in a marriage founded on shared socialist principles and a leaden sense of duty. Logic and the expectations of others might dictate that Karla continue with this relationship, yet she is offered the opportunity to leave Mike for the chance of love with a man who does not share her background or principles.
Through her characters, Heller asks why people stick to old principles. Is it because they have invested too much in the values they held before? Is it because they are scared to renegotiate their life? is it because the new path before them revolts them as much as it attracts?
Yet The Believers does not pose this set of moral questions baldly. In fact, Heller laces her wonderful writing with rum-dark humour to create a potent set of interlinked stories in which the moral dilemmas only sometimes surface. What stands out is the vividness of the scenes and the sharply-drawn characters.
Third Way readers might like to consider that though the Litvinoff family is founded solidly on left-wing liberal principles, the same tale could equally be told of a well-established church family that finds itself in crisis. After a while, unquestioned principles can take us only so far. If we are not to reach a breaking point we must continually question and develop our beliefs in the light of the experience that our lives give us.
Clare F Hobba
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