The Believers by Zoe Heller

Review by Tova Mirvis

Zoe Heller’s third novel, The Believers, follows her widely acclaimed What Was She Thinking: Notes on a Scandal, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and was a stunning feat of voice and characterization. An account of schoolteacher Sheba Hart’s affair with a student, the book is narrated by the priggish, judgmental Barbara Covett, a fellow schoolteacher whose obsessive recounting of the romance reveals not only the workings of her friend’s heart but, more richly and darkly, her own.

What made Notes on a Scandal so spectacular was the way Heller zeroed in on the complex motivations behind desire, envy and loneliness. In The Believers, Heller’s writing is as muscular and precise, and this time she lays bare not the motivations of the heart but the contradictions of the mind, asking what happens to political and religious ideology as it meets everyday life. At the center of The Believers is the Litvinoff family, whose patriarch Joel is a well-known liberal lawyer, now defending one of the “Schenectady Six,” a group of Arab-Americans arrested as terror suspects in the wake of 9/11. On the morning of the trial’s opening arguments, Joel awakes with a headache, a harbinger of the debilitating stroke he will soon suffer. But before this happens, he spends his final morning of consciousness alternating between concerns large and small – rehearsing his opening argument and criticizing his wife Audrey for forgetting to buy his bialy.

British-born Audrey is known for her caustic honesty and extreme political opinions; she, for example, thinks Joel should defend his client on the basis of “legitimate Arab rage.” For Joel, this comes as a source of great amusement: “He rather enjoyed the irony of being chastised for his insufficient radicalism by the woman to whom he had once had to explain the Marxist concepts of “base” and “superstructure.” Audrey’s self-certainty is slowly challenged as the novel progresses, especially as she sits by Joel’s hospital bed and eviscerates the doctor who has asked her to sign a do-not-resuscitate order.

How often had they shaken their heads ruefully at the dotty sanctity-of-life types who insisted on keeping their loved ones alive when they were no more sensate than parsnips? [Now that the conversation] had departed the comfortable realm of dinner-table posturing…she understood how cowardly their former bravado had been. All those jokes about not wasting public health resources, and suffocating one another with plastic bags – what had they really been but avoidance?

The growing fissures in the Litvinoffs’ systems of belief are evident in other places as well. For all their talk of justice and equality, charity and compassion, the Litvinoffs are a remarkably unhappy lot, as though their hearts had been cauterized by the intensity of their ideals. Their three children have, for the most part, inherited their family’s political ideologies but little sense of familial love.

Lenny, adopted when his birth mother was arrested for bank robbery, is the only child able to unleash Audrey’s maternal sentiment. When she first sees him, “she felt a tiny aperture clicking open, a pilot lit being lit somewhere deep within.... She wanted to pick the boy up and – she didn’t know what – squeeze him, kiss him, swallow him whole.” But despite this love, or because of it, she becomes an enabler for his various drug addictions, unable to see what he is doing to himself. But Audrey has no trouble seeing her two daughters Karla and Rosa (named for Karl Marx and Rosa Parks) through a glaringly honest, excessively harsh lens. “As the coauthor of Karla and Rosa, she could not help but look upon them with the dissatisfied eye of an artist assessing her own flawed handiwork.” Both daughters spend much of their lives wanting to please their parents, but eventually begin to forge their own ideals and lives.

Breaking most openly with her parents avowed atheism (or “anti-theism,” as they call it) is the youngest daughter Rosa. Newly returned from several years of living in Cuba espousing revolutionary socialism, she wanders into a synagogue one afternoon where to her surprise she is moved to tears, which launches her into a deeper exploration of Orthodox Judaism. “She was not so swept away that she could not see the high comedy of this spiritual seduction: a Litvinoff daughter, a third-generation atheist, an enemy of all forms of magical thinking, wandering into a synagogue one day and finding her inner Jew. But there it was. Something had happened to her, something she could not ignore or deny.”

In Orthodox Judaism, Heller has found the perfect foil for her exploration of practice versus ideology. In scenes that range from a Monsey rabbi’s Shabbat table to an Upper West Side mikvah, Heller brilliantly contrasts the family’s political ideologies with the tenets of Orthodox Judaism that privilege minute acts of practice over adherence to larger, sweeping beliefs. Unable to commit to religious observance, Rosa senses that the rabbi whom she has befriended has tired of allowing her to “believe her interest was virtue enough,” and she is shocked to hear him laud the value of going through the motions without achieving wholehearted faith. God, he tells her, “doesn’t need our perfect understanding or even our perfect faith. What he wants is our commitment, our actions.”

Rosa’s sister Karla, a hospital social worker, is the daughter who “had to work hardest to elicit the palest ray of her parents’ approval or interest. But by some strange process, her lowly status within the family had only inflamed her ardor for the institution.” Particularly enamored of her father, she once considered a career in law, until her mother casually, cruelly mentions that she might be “a bit dyslexic,” and encourages her to pursue a nurturing profession, though “it had not escaped Karla that being a nurturer occupied a very low rung on her parents’ hierarchy of valuable life pursuits.” After two years of unsuccessfully trying to get pregnant, Karla and her husband, a union organizer, are trying to adopt a child, an activity for which she is able to muster only half-hearted interest. While her parents are debating the larger issues of the Muslim world in relation to post-9/11 America, Karla begins a quiet affair with an Arab man who owns the newsstand in the hospital where she works. Here too, Heller’s plot allows her to ask whether societal ills are best overcome on the small scale or on the large, in the realm of action or ideals.

The family shakeup at the heart of the book, revealed as Joel is in a prolonged comatose state, feels somewhat predictable, and given the originality of Heller’s insight and the novelistic prowess she exhibits on every page, one wishes for a more uncommon betrayal. But perhaps Heller’s point is that uncommon people stray in common ways. There are certainly literary precedents for the particular betrayal – most recently, it brings to mind the plot of The Sorrows of an American by Siri Hustvedt – but more broadly, it raises anew the much-asked question about the personal failings of men in power and wonders whether these shortcomings undermine larger public accomplishments. In a post-Clinton/Spitzer/Edwards world, this seeming contradiction between the public and private self should come as no surprise to anyone, yet as Heller reminds us, when it is our family, it always does.

It is to Heller’s credit that she makes this point without seeming didactic; rarely do the characters feel like mouthpieces for the novel’s underlying ideas. The book is funny, challenging and sardonic, and one of its chief pleasures comes from being granted uncompromising access to the characters’ minds. They may not be likeable, but they are always compelling and engaging. The same can be said of the various ideologies that Heller explores; she has a great deal of fun pointing out their fallacies and excesses, but her point is not to argue for or against these particular convictions – one could easily imagine a companion novel written about a far right wing, conservative family. Ultimately, Heller is more interested in reminding us how easy it is to have ideals, how hard it is to live them.

Excerpt

Guilt – genuine, personal guilt, as opposed to some abstract, mandatory sense of shame about being a rich, white American – was a very recent addition to Rosa’s emotional repertoire. For most of her life, she had been immunized against self-reproach by the certitudes of her socialist faith. All her moral disappointment had been reserved for others – schoolmates who failed to resist the temptation of South African fruit, college acquaintances who were insufficiently concerned about the fate of the Angolan freedom fighters, bourgeois parents who pretended to socialist virtue. As a teenager, she had often been urged by her father to temper her revolutionary zeal with some sympathy for human frailty. “Only ideas are perfect. People never are,” Joel would tell her. “When you’ve lived a bit longer, you’ll be more forgiving.” But Rosa had scorned these attempts to modify her wrath. For a person as deeply offended by injustice and inequity as she was – as committed to changing the world – a degree of ruthlessness was imperative, she felt. Her usual response to her father had been to quote Lenin’s defense of Bolshevik tactics: “Is regard for humanity possible in such an unheard-of ferocious struggle? By what measure do you measure the quantity of necessary and unnecessary blows in a fight?”

Now, though, this paradisiacal era of righteousness had come to an end. After a long and valiant battle against doubt, she had finally surrendered her political faith, and with it the densely woven screen of doctrinal abstraction through which she was accustomed to viewing the world. For the first time, she was charting her course without the guiding stars of revolutionary principles. To say that this was a humbling business did not begin to convey her desolation. All her adult life, she had imagined herself striding along in history’s vanguard like one of those muscular heroines in a Soviet constructive poster. Now, she had been thrown back into the ignominious ranks of bourgeois liberalism. She had become just another do-gooder, hoping to make a difference by taking underprivileged girls on museum trips. She did not – could not – wish to have her old delusions back, but how she yearned for the self-assurance she had experienced while in their thrall! (pages 58-59)

Questions for Discussion

1) The Believers opens with a prologue in which Joel and Audrey meet, and we are briefly shown a scene involving Audrey’s immigrant parents. Why does Heller choose to begin the book this way? How important are the circumstances of Audrey’s family background to the novel as a whole? How important is the fact that Joel and Audrey are both Jewish?

2) The characters in this novel would not generally be considered “likeable.” How important is this to you as a reader? Do you have to identify with or like the characters in order to like a book?

3) Rosa works for a Harlem girls’ after-school program, and though she believes in the work, she can’t quite bring herself to like the girls. When she runs into a college friend, he is shocked at the apparent smallness of her achievements to date. “I would have thought you’d be running an African country or something,” he blurts out. Given her earlier aspirations, should Rosa’s job choice be considered a failure? In what capacity is she able to make the greatest difference?

4) Audrey and Joel adopt a child, because, in Joel’s words, it was “a subversive gesture, a vote for an enlightened ‘tribal’ system of childrearing that would one day supersede the repressive nuclear unit altogether.” Karla and Mike also decide to adopt a baby because she is unable to get pregnant, but Karla is not excited about the prospect. Consider the role that adoption plays in the novel, and compare the various mother/child relationships that Heller depicts.

5) Audrey prides herself on always speaking the truth, even when it is cruel. In accordance with something she has read in a book given to her by a rabbi, Rosa admonishes herself to accept the truth from whoever gives it. In this novel, what is the relationship between truth telling and nastiness?

6) How does The Believers make use of its New York setting? Could this book have been set anywhere else? How important is 9/11 to the novel?

7) The family is shocked when Joel turns out to have had a mistress and another child. Given their general skepticism and worldliness, do you think they should be so surprised? Does his personal failing undermine his public accomplishments?

8) In the words of Rosa, she has “broken bread with Daniel Ortega and sung freedom songs with ANC activists in Soweto and played softball with Abbie Hoffman... Yet, in truth, her worldliness applied to a very narrow band of the world, and there were large areas of ordinary American life about which her impeccably progressive, internationalist upbringing had left her astonishingly ignorant.” Based on what you have read of Rosa, Karla and Lenny, do you agree with this assessment of their upbringing?

9) In one of the few moments in the novel when Rosa and her mother Audrey engage in a personal conversation, Rosa tells her mother of her plan to study in a Jerusalem yeshiva and asks her what she would do if “you thought you’d found the truth about something, would you walk away from it because it wasn’t the truth you particularly wanted, or expected to find?” What do you make of Audrey’s answer that she would reject it?

10) At Joel’s funeral, Audrey offers a testament to Joel’s public persona, while shielding from view his private failings. She hides her own anger at his betrayals and publicly embraces Joel’s mistress and child, whom she has repudiated in private. Is this act a moral triumph or moral failing?

The Jewish Reader is a publication of the National Yiddish Book Center
Amherst, MA
editor: Nancy Sherman
www.jewishreader.org