Unhappy in Their Own Way
Zoë Heller's subtle, satirical third novel, The Believers, is a worthy successor to her previous book, Notes on a Scandal, (later a film), which was short-listed for the 2003 Man Booker prize. This time the author chronicles the dysfunctional Litvinoff family in post-9/11 New York City, a family that superbly illustrates Leo Tolstoy's observation that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. In telling its story, Heller demonstrates a consummate skill at portraying human fallibility without acerbity.
A brief prologue to the novel set at a London party in 1962 introduces Audrey, a pretty, 19-year-old English typist. She is Jewish, a socialist and has a sharp rancorous mindset. Meeting three young male students, she notes silently, "Up close the three men were a small anthology of body odors." Coming upon the dashing, charismatic Joel, Audrey sizes him up shrewdly, is impressed, and impetuously elopes with him.
The story jumps ahead 40 years. The Litvinoffs now live in a run-down townhouse in a rapidly gentrifying Greenwich Village among yuppies they hold in contempt. Audrey has evolved into motherhood, maturing as an adult termagant with a razor-sharp, obscene and hilarious tongue. Her husband, Joel, is an aging, high-profile Jewish radical lawyer reminiscent of William Kunstler or Leonard Boudin, the sun around whom the family orbits. There are two grown daughters, Karla and Rosa, and an adopted son, Lenny, whose radical birth mother is in prison for bank robbery. Heller now takes a bold story-telling gamble. Telling the story from many points of view, she silences the voice of the father, leaving Audrey to dominate the next 300 pages. I would have relished more of Joel but his influence on all the believers is profound; silent, he is nevertheless present.
While not a sign-carrying activist, Audrey remains passionately committed politically. But at home she is a misanthrope. She likes no one but Joel and Lenny and lacks all maternal instincts. "Try as she might," Heller writes, "she could not feel her daughters' happinesses and sorrows as her own. The miniature dramas of their lives bored her, to tell the truth." In contrast she is much kinder to Lenny, a dependent heroin addict. In short, Audrey has dedicated herself to a haphazard, boring domesticity and the myth of reflected glory in being the wife of a great man.
The Litvinoffs appear to be a unified clan, staunch supporters of progressive causes, but the image is far from reality. The children are lost in their private miseries. Karla, the elder daughter, a hospital social worker, is unhappily married to a union organizer who is a bully. Chronically overweight, Karla sees herself as ugly and unlovable, and her mother relentlessly baits her. "You look like you've been putting on weight," Audrey said. "Thank you." "Don't get the hump. No one else is going to say it."
Rosa, who had lived for four years in Castro's Cuba before disillusion struck, restlessly seeks some new faith and, to her mother's deep chagrin, begins to explore Orthodox Judaism. "I'm going to Monsey for the weekend," she tells Audrey. "Muncie? What, in Idaho?" "No, Monsey upstate." Audrey looked at Rosa's calf-length navy skirt and high-necked black blouse. Her eyes narrowed. "Is this something Jewy?" "Actually I'm attending a Shabbaton." "And what the f--- is that when it's had its hair washed?"
Joel, while preparing to defend an Arab-American on charges of terrorism (for visiting an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan in 1998), suffers a stroke in court and lapses into a long coma. The portrait of the family's political oneness-and more-begins to disintegrate. A comely middle-aged black woman emerges to proclaim that she and Joel were once lovers, with a five-year-old son to prove it. "Perhaps he'd been feeling frisky one night." Audrey reflects. "You think I care? You think I'm staying up nights because that slag had Joel's baby? You're wrong. I don't give a s---!" But she does, and she must accommodate. Joel-worship is her true religion. Fierce and indomitable, faced with her husband's infidelity, his mistress and their love child, Audrey ultimately finds solace in the values and life that she and Joel once shared.
Never mind that years of her life with Joel were a lie. But without him, she lacks purpose, and desperation beckons. Like her or not, Audrey is a survivor. Vituperative and impulsive, Audrey is also a brave and loyal wife, still in love with her husband. Neither an appealing nor even a nice person, she is memorable. It is a tribute to Heller's skill as a novelist that she beats the literary odds to make Audrey so vibrant that she nearly makes believers of us all.
Sheila Solomon Klass is the author of 19 works of fiction and non-fiction. Her most recent book is a young adult novel, Soldier's Secret: The Story of Deborah Sampson.
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