The Believers

Joseph O'Neill

"A moving, deeply intelligent look at intellectual loyalties-to ideology, religion, family-and the humans attached to them. This is a wonderful novel."

Richard Price

"A beautiful, oftentimes hilarious, razor-precise portrait of a family, a city, and an examination of the eternal and universal urge to embrace something, anything, greater than ourselves."

Anne Enright

"Tough, wise and funny. . . . A sustaining, intelligent novel about how the big questions affect and change all our small lives."

Lionel Shriver

"Profoundly satisfying. . . . Heller injects that difficult-to-pinpoint something-or-other that elevates soap opera to art. . . . The Believers pulses with . . . something deep and lasting and larger than mere story."

Ron Charles

…if you need to like the characters to enjoy a novel, skip right on to something more heartwarming because Heller is the master of unpleasant people. It's a testament to her respect for the full spectrum of human nature that her fiercely drawn characters endure satiric exposure that would burn weaker ones to a crisp…Somewhere between the novels of Allegra Goodman and Claire Messud, The Believers charts out a terrain all its own. If you haven't read Heller yet, prepare to be converted.
—The Washington Post

Michiko Kakutani

Ms. Heller…is an extraordinarily entertaining writer, and this novel showcases her copious gifts, including a scathing, Waugh-like wit; an unerring ear for the absurdities of contemporary speech; and a native-born Brit's radar for class and status distinctions.
—The New York Times

Jill Abramson

As a meditation on radicalism and its impact on families, this is no American Pastoral, and the Litvinoffs are no tribe of Levov. But their struggles to find their beliefs—in themselves, in their ill father, in politics and religion—are absorbing. And the effort of the family to hold together as Joel, its centripetal force, ebbs away, keeps the novel moving along briskly. It's funny and sad at the same time…a compelling tale of familial self-discovery.
—The New York Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly

Heller (What Was She Thinking?; Notes on a Scandal) puts to pointed use her acute observations of human nature in her third novel, a satire of 1960s idealism soured in the early 21st century. Audrey and Joel Litvinoff have attempted to pass on to their children their lefty passions-despite Audrey's decidedly bourgeois attitude and attorney Joel's self-satisfied heroism, including the defense of a suspected terrorist in 2002 New York City. When Joel has a stroke and falls into a coma, Audrey grows increasingly nasty as his secrets surface. The children, meanwhile, wander off on their own adventures: Rosa's inherited principles are beleaguered by the unpleasant realities of her work with troubled adolescents; Karla, her self-image crushed by Audrey, has settled into an uncomfortable marriage and the accompanying pressure to have children; and adopted Lenny, the best metaphor for the family's troubles, dawdles along as a drug addict and master manipulator. Though some may be initially put off by the characters' coldness-the Litvinoffs are a severely screwed-up crew-readers with a certain mindset will have a blast watching things get worse. (Mar.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Library Journal

Heller (What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal) returns with an engrossing story of a severely dysfunctional New York family struggling to find its place in a quickly changing world. Joel Litvinoff, a famous civil rights lawyer, and his acerbic wife, Audrey, have spent their many years together as political protesters, raising their children with the same radical social consciousness. But when Joel suffers a stroke, the family, never a peaceful unit to begin with, loses what little cohesion it had. Eldest daughter Rosa, who had always mirrored her parents' views, decides to embrace Orthodox Judaism. Her meek and unattractive sister, Karla, a social worker married to a critical, arrogant union man, has an affair. Adopted son Lenny, an addict and ne'er-do-well, decides to sober up and get a job. Audrey remains in contention with all of them, angry that Rosa would stoop to religion, remorselessly picking on Karla's weight, and denigrating Lenny's efforts to remake his life apart from her. Heller writes with insight and honesty about the pain involved in testing one's beliefs and the possibility of growth in the process. Recommended for all fiction collections.
—Joy Humphrey

Kirkus Reviews

This sociopolitical comedy of manners concerning a radical lawyer in a coma is beyond the novelist's satiric command. The main problem with the latest from the British Heller (What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal, 2003, etc.) is that it lacks focus. It could have focused on Joel Litvinoff, a famous activist attorney described by those who despise him as a "rent-a-radical with a long history of un-Americanism," but he's unconscious in his hospital bed for the bulk of the book. It wants to focus on his wife Audrey, like the novelist a British-born transplant to New York, whom the older Joel seduces in London when she is 18 and who remains married to him for 40 years. The problem is that Audrey is the least compelling character, with little explanation as to how she has become such a doctrinaire radical harridan (much more rigid than her husband), a "champagne socialist" hypocrite and unloving mother to her two daughters. Maybe Karla and Rosa, the daughters estranged from each other, could have provided the focus. The former is a heavy, good-hearted woman who must choose between her loveless marriage and an improbable affair. The latter is more attractive and resents the superficiality of her beauty; she is an extremist in everything she does, having returned from four years in Cuba to embrace, or at least investigate, the Judaism her parents long ago rejected (and which runs counter to her own feminism). Unfortunately, their stories only connect at the bedside of their comatose father, a center that cannot hold. Adopted son Lenny, from an even more radical family, mainly provides comic relief as his mother's marijuana supplier, until he cleans up. What promises to propel the narrativeis Joel's deep secret, revealed while he is unconscious, but even that seems on the periphery, before its unlikely resolution provides something of a climax. Tom Wolfe might once have had vicious fun with such material, but this novel lacks the edge to make it sharper than soap opera. Agent: Amanda Urban/ICM

The Barnes & Noble Review

Zoë Heller's much-lauded 2004 novel, What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal was a tour-de-force depiction of a family's unraveling. Heller's triumph in that book was to delve so deeply into the heads of the two main characters -- one of whom had been involved in an affair with her teenage student -- that it was impossible to feel entirely unsympathetic about their egregiously selfish actions. The Believers is a similarly careful portrait of a family in trouble. But this time, Heller has multiplied her perspective to focus on a cast of characters, shifted the drama to America, and invoked a whole new set of questions about the way families go awry.

The novel opens in London in 1962, where a mousy young woman, Audrey, is swept off her feet by a visiting American lawyer, Joel Litvinoff, at an otherwise dull party. Joel insists on accompanying Audrey to visit her parents the next day, squeezing in a date before he must return to the States. Having accelerated the get-to-know-you phase of their relationship, Joel wastes no more time and proposes that Audrey marry him. She accepts, and the two begin a life together in New York. The novel skips ahead 40 years and resumes in 2002, in Greenwich Village, where Audrey and Joel inhabit a ramshackle townhouse, with a revolving door for their friends and family. Now a hotshot civil rights lawyer, Joel is preparing to defend an Arab American who has visited an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan and is accused of terrorism. Joel suffers a stroke the morning of the trial and abruptly bows out of the novel. As he lies in the hospital, his daughters and son assemble, bringing with them the full array of family hang-ups and hardships.

Karla, his perpetually overweight elder daughter, works as a hospital social worker but is unable to have a frank conversation with either her husband or mother. Karla's husband, Mike, is a bully: upon their discovery of Karla's inability to conceive, he decides that they will adopt a child, ignoring his wife's obvious reservations about becoming a mother.

Rosa, the younger daughter, has recently returned from an extended period of travel in Cuba, where her revolutionary activities blended with love affairs, neither leaving her with much to show for her time abroad. She has taken a job at an afterschool program for teenage girls in Harlem but seems to hold more contempt than care for her charges. The only thing that brightens her predominantly lackluster life is her newfound interest in Orthodox Judaism.

Lennie, the Litvinoffs' adopted son, is perhaps the most troubled and directionless of all the children. Although in his 30s, he is unable to complete even a paint job for his mother's friend. He dabbles in drugs, then dangerously experiments, and seems to have no sense of his own possibility. Audrey indulges and even ignores his failures, allowing him to perpetuate his self-abuse. While she doles out $20 bills to her son, she is equally generous in distributing scorn and derision to her daughters, making fun of Rosa's religion and openly criticizing Karla for her weight.

The sudden stress of Joel's stroke heightens these tensions, which are brought to a fever pitch by the emergence of Berenice Mason, Joel's longtime mistress, with whom he has fathered a child, now five years old. If there was one belief to which Audrey, the most cynical and disillusioned of all the characters, adhered, it was the goodness of Joel -- the man to whom she was devoted for 40 years. The appearance of Berenice shakes the ground beneath her feet, shattering the only faith she has had.

Despite all this discontent, The Believers is compulsively readable. One turns the pages not so much to learn what happens next, but to learn how the characters cope with their missteps, how they navigate the web of obligations, duties, and resentments in which they are caught. The frequent reversals in point of view prevent Heller from developing exceedingly intimate portrayals of her characters of the type that made Notes on a Scandal so extraordinary, but her alternation constructs a rounded, general vision of distress.

The recurring shift in perspective also augments the sense that Heller is juggling several different contemporary tropes. The Believers reminded me of Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children, which dealt with privileged, overeducated, and underemployed young New Yorkers coming to terms with the post-9/11 world; at other times it recalled Allegra Goodman's Kaaterskill Falls, a book about Orthodox Jewish life in upstate New York (Rosa makes several pilgrimages to this region) and the push and pull of religious and secular forces. But if Heller has not confined herself to one portrait of misery -- and instead argues for the pervasiveness of the malady -- why should she constrain herself to one approach to her theme?

Paradoxically, this somber novel maintains a lively clip, losing its entertaining hold on us only occasionally, when the multiple viewpoints work to obscure the motives of individual characters. Few contemporary writers have Heller's ability to weave moments of lyricism into the everyday lives of her characters, and these moments keep her focus sharp. If the characters in The Believers all suffer some sort of crisis of faith, the novel itself leaves no doubt as to Heller's talents. --Chloë Schama

Chloë Schama's writing has appeared in the New York Sun and other publications.