by Zoë Heller (Fig Tree, £16.99)
The moment that propels Joel Litvinoff and Audrey Howard from a half-hearted one night stand into a 40-year marriage could easily have gone either way. When, in the prologue to Zoë Heller's new novel, Audrey first observes Howard from the self-conscious sidelines of a crowded party, she can't decide whether he is "very charming or very irritating." The next day, as Howard tries to assess their impromptu first date (an awkward visit to her parents), his mood rocks between bafflement, amusement and frustration. And even though they end up in bed together that evening, they still fail to read each other correctly—a combination of embarrassment, provocation and fantastical thinking that results in a haphazard proposal of marriage and an unexpected acceptance.
This fateful meeting happens in 1962—the same summer that, in Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach, sees a similar confluence of timing and temperaments shove two naive lovers firmly in the opposite direction. But, if Joel and Audrey's life together begins with an accidental tumble into commitment, by the time we next meet them all doubts have been replaced by convictions, and all mutability has hardened into the characters—or rather the caricatures—they have become.
The Believers picks up Joel and Audrey's story in New York in 2002. We take our place among the family members gathered at Joel's sickbed in the wake of a stroke—and it quickly becomes clear that we're tiptoeing into familiar Heller territory. In her two previous novels, Everything You Know (1999) and Notes on a Scandal (2003), first-person narrators told their tales with Swiftian disdain—their mouths twisted into sneers of perverse relish, their fingers itching to administer a prick to the social pretensions and private vanities of those around them. Similarly, the third-person narrator of The Believers begins from the premise that hell is other people. The discomforting intimacy with which the characters' bodies and minds are laid bare gives the distinct impression that this narrator is someone who—were they not blessed with authorial omniscience—would, like Barbara in Notes on a Scandal, be a listener at doors, a sniffer of laundry baskets, a rifler through pockets.
Without the alibi of a single character's voice, such a stark insistence upon the ugly truth (and upon the fundamental ugliness of the truth) presents a serious challenge to a reader's credulity and commitment to the story. Indeed, the Litvinoff family had barely received a prognosis before I was hoping someone might pull the plug on Joel's life support, if only to spare him the tedium of returning to such a dysfunctional domestic set-up and to spare everyone at the hospital from further exposure to Audrey's monumental awfulness: "Yes, something's up. He's had a stroke… Alright, don't get dramatic. This isn't fucking Oprah.'' Which it isn't—but it does prompt similar questions about whether such people can possibly be "for real," and why on earth we would want to spend time in their company.
Gradually, each of the three Litvinoff children starts to chip away at the principles, illusions or habits that have shaped and stifled them. Rosa, the eldest, has already abandoned the revolutionary Marxist ideology of her youth; now she risks her atheist mother's scorn by taking tentative steps towards orthodox Judaism. Overweight, infertile Karla, whose "lowly status within the family had only inflamed her ardour for the institution," begins to question the adoption procedure she's being bullied into by her husband and embarks upon an affair with Khaled, a shy Egyptian who possesses none of her family's political awareness, but is capable of offering her the sweet food and unconditional adoration she craves. Directionless, drug-addicted Lenny tries to put sufficient distance between himself and his mother (whose zealous love proves just as toxic to him as her sour criticism does to her daughters) to get clean. In outline, it sounds schematic. But Heller imbues each of her converts with enough caution and scepticism to make their individual journeys convincing.
A harder trick to pull off is the redemption of Audrey, whose venom borders on the pathological, as even she—in a rare flash of self-knowledge—perceives: "She was no longer a sexy young woman with a charmingly short fuse but a middle-aged termagant—it was too late. The anger had become part of her." Heller excels at creating such monsters, and it must have been tempting to give free rein to Audrey's belligerence. But The Believers follows a more subtle course, tempering the streak of cruelty which eventually sent Notes on a Scandal skittering off down the blind alley of gothic.
"Only ideas are perfect. People never are." This was Joel's warning to Rosa when she was in the grip of righteous fervour. It turns out to be the novel's message too; and though the leitmotif feels a little heavy-handed, The Believers will leave both Heller devotees and agnostics in no doubt about her talent.
