Zoe Heller - ‘The Believers’

Review by Peter Lawrence May 21st '09.
Zoe Heller took the world by storm with her last novel, ‘Notes On a Scandal’, in which she dealt very courageously with the difficult subject of a sexual relationship between a female teacher and a fifteen year old boy. Heller tackled the taboo of teenage sex and adults led by their emotions rather than their heads with great sensitivity and skill and won justly deserved praise for her work. The book served not only to entertain but also to instruct and provoke thought and debate. It was ultimately turned into a very successful film starring Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett.
This new novel does not disappoint. Here Heller shows that she can be consistently excellent. The subject matter this time could not be more different, but I came away from the novel having enjoyed my time with it immensely. It entertains, it instructs and it thrills.
Audrey is a sixty something English matriarch of the most fearsome kind, living in New York with her American husband Joel, a feisty and brutally successful lawyer. They have been married for forty years and have fallen into the kind of happiness and acceptance of each other that leads to one taking for granted that one knows all there is to know about the other. At the start of the book Joel is lying in a coma having suffered two strokes.
There are three children. Rosa, who comes from a background of revolution and anarchy but now finds herself forging a relationship with Orthodox Judaism; Karla, desperately unhappy in a conventional marriage and job and looking for love even though she doesn’t know it; and adopted son Lenny, the apple of Audrey’s eye, who can do no wrong in her eyes despite the fact that he can do no right in anyone else’s. All five rub along together reasonably well until Audrey makes a completely life-changing and devastating discovery about her husband that throws everything she has never questioned into complete disarray. All of them believe, as the title suggests, in a world they have become familiar with and never had cause to question. Now, the security of the radicalism they have espoused for so long has been dealt a fatal blow.
All of the main characters are very well drawn and utterly believable. Whilst we may not see ourselves in the midst of such domestic mayhem, we are completely convinced by the tribulations of this particular household. Heller uses the third person throughout the book, so there is no one dominant voice. This is a complete departure from the intimacy of ‘Notes on a Scandal’. Audrey is something of a monster, by far the biggest and most engaging character, spitting venom and fury at all around her, particularly at her long suffering friend Jean, but nonetheless she does not dominate the whole book.
What does dominate are the ideas and securities that we all hold dear and never scrutinise or challenge, the stability that we all take for granted. What make us engage with the book, and feel its discomfort so profoundly, is the knowledge that it could so easily happen to us. The circumstances might be different and less dramatic, and the values and beliefs different too, but the devastating consequences can be the same. Ultimately, though, we can all reconcile ourselves to change and be strengthened by it.
Zoe Heller is a novelist of consummate skill. She has achieved in fiction a very compelling portrayal, as in her previous book, of issues of morality and great human significance. She shows that these matters can be dealt with as brilliantly in fiction as in factual debate and investigation.