THE BELIEVERS - Zoe Heller - Fiction

There's something anachronistically comfortable about the richly detailed, character-driven novel, and Zoe Heller pulls it off perfectly in THE BELIEVERS. Centered around the Litvinoffs (husband and wife Joel and Audrey, two daughters, Rosa and Karla, and adopted son Lenny, as well as numerous spouses, roommates, hangers-on, and friends) the novel cannily chooses to forsake plot for a multi-faceted exploration of issues, ranging from, of course, belief, to feminism, marriage, varying forms of anglophone culture, and race. With every viewpoint given a character to side with and a character to hate, the explorations of THE BELIEVERS are enjoyable rather than pedantic, and carried out in sparkly witty, if acerbic, dialogue.

The novel suffers slightly from having no strong male characters for the group of women to play off of (Joel is felled by a stroke in the novel's first few pages; Lenny is a resolute fuck-up and a manipulative drug addict who I still do not believe as a thirty-four-year-old; the various husbands and dates are, to a man, blase). The most charming and interesting scenes, from the point of view of pure story, show Joel as a father, making French toast for his children's breakfast while explaining the necessity of armed struggle. Another interesting exploration for the novel: how revolutionaries deal with the quotidian aspects of day-to-day life, marriage, and child-rearing. The novel wants to answer a broad and flip "not well" but where it gives us detail, it is insightful and clever.

In an interview with Heller, conducted shortly after the novel's release, she stressed her desire to make Rosa's conversion to orthodox Judaism believable. Although the state of her push-me-pull-you conversion is left ambiguous even at the novel's end (she is seen wearing a headscarf at her father's funeral, but never shied away from embracing some aspects of tradition while rejecting others) I have to say that Rosa's interest never fully came clear for me. There's the moment of divine revelation in the synagogue, when Rosa feels a deep inner sense of belonging, and comes to tears at the end of a service; there's the admiration of tradition and the desire to fully adhere to a set of strictures in order to prove her seriousness to the world; there's the convenient aspect of Rosa's self-denial of physical pleasures, and the inverse pleasure she takes in that denial. And yet. The rabbi who guides Rosa's conversion immediately jumps into the tough stuff: rejection of Darwinian evolution, subservient roles for women, adhering strictly to the Sabbath. It's never quite explained why Rosa goes straight for Orthodox Judaism rather than easing into it through one of the other flavors of Judaic belief; perhaps it's her family's nature that half measures will not do, and the most extreme point of view must be the line taken, but many of the difficulties Rosa has with the more inexplicable aspects of Orthodox belief would be easily taken care of by following a less commanding version of the religion. Rosa's response to the rabbi's nonsensical argument that evolution may not be true because the Hebrew word translated in the bible as god's "six days" may refer to any period of time is met by Rosa's equivocal thoughts that there may be something in that theory. Really? Someone as needy as Rosa when it comes to being seen as worthy by the world will have invested much more of herself in her intelligence than we see. Her rejection of scientific principles should bear a higher cost to her self-worth than it seems to.

But there's always that one character to hate. Heller has been criticized for providing no purely "relatable" characters in this novel (as though the heroine of NOTES ON A SCANDAL were relatable?) but that's simply one of the joys of the character-driven novel: seeing real people, hearing intimate conversations, and never having to meet Audrey and her family in real life. Here's to the Litvinoffs.