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Synopsis
When radical New York lawyer Joel Litvinoff is felled by a stroke, his wife, Audrey, uncovers a secret that forces her to reexamine everything she thought she knew about their forty-year marriage. Joel's children will soon have to come to terms with this discovery themselves, but for the meantime, they are struggling with their own dilemmas and doubts.
Rosa, a disillusioned revolutionary, has found herself drawn into the world of Orthodox Judaism and is now being pressed to make a commitment to that religion. Karla, a devoted social worker hoping to adopt a child with her husband, is falling in love with the owner of a newspaper stand outside her office. Ne'er-do-well Lenny is living at home, approaching another relapse into heroin addiction.
In the course of battling their own demons-and one another-the Litvinoff clan is called upon to examine long-held articles of faith that have formed the basis of their lives together and their identities as individuals. In the end, all the family members will have to answer their own questions and decide what-if anything-they still believe in.
Hailed by the Sunday Times (London) as "one of the outstanding novels of the year," The Believers explores big ideas with a light touch, delivering a tragic, comic family story as unsparing as it is filled with compassion.
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.