The Believers: A Novel
by Zoe Heller
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Book Summary Information
Author: Zoe HellerEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-03-03
ISBN: 006143020X
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Harper
Book Reviews of The Believers: A Novel
Book Review: Are We Laughing With Them or at Them? Maybe Both.
Summary: 5 Stars
Zoe Heller can write. She is a master of acerbic wit, denigration, parody. sarcasm, and layered complexity. She writes with a sensibility that I can only compare to varying musical keys. Her story vacillates from the minor keys to the major, from melodic to dissonant, sometimes in the same paragraph.
This novel is about the Litvinoff family. There is Audrey, the mother and matriarch. She has an attitude like spoiled meat. She "was always congratulating herself on her audacious honesty, her willingness to express what everyone else was thinking. But no one...actually shared Audrey's ugly view of the world. It was not the truth of her observations that made people laugh, but their unfairness, their surreal cruelty" (p.53). No one is spared from her cruelty except her husband and her son, Lenny. Audrey wonders how she has become a harridan. "Once upon a time, her brash manner had been a mere posture - - a convenient and amusing way for an insecure teenage bride, newly arrived in America, to disguise her crippling shyness." (p189) "But somewhere along the way, when she hadn't been paying attention, her temper had ceased to be a beguiling party act that could be switched on an off at will. It had begun to express authentic resentments: boredom with motherhood, fury at her husband's philandering, despair at the pettiness of her domestic fate". (p. 189) "Her anger had become part of her. It was a knotted thicket in her gut, too dense to be cut down and too deeply entrenched in the loamy soil of her disappointments to be uprooted". (p. 190) Audrey's public persona is that she is the power behind the throne, Joel's muse. At heart, however, she knows she is not that. Had she not married Joel, she would have been relegated to a clerical job in England and probably never have left the provincial town where she was raised.
Joel has been a star in the ideological socialist battle, a protester at heart. He is an attorney who has championed the underdog whether guilty or innocent. He does this until the day he has a stroke while in the midst of a trial for an alleged Al Quaida sympathizer.
Rosa had been her father's star child, the one who appeared to take the family's ideological messages most to heart. She had lived in Cuba for four years, marched while a student at Bard college and wanted her father's approval. Lately, however, she has been toying with the idea of orthodox Judaism much to her parents' chagrin. Now, her Rabbi has asked her to make a commitment to Judaism.
Karla is a passive and quiet social worker, locked into a stale marriage to a union organizer who doesn't appreciate her. While growing up she was the lost child, the one who desperately sought, but rarely received attention. She is self-denigrating and worries constantly about her weight and her body image. Audrey doesn't help things by telling Karla how fat she is. Now Karla is finding herself falling in love with the owner of a newspaper kiosk near her work site and she is torn about what to do. Her husband wants to adopt a child and this is not something Karla is interested in doing.
Lenny is the adopted child. He is a n'eer do well with a history of drug addiction and several stints in rehab. He is Audrey's favorite, the one who she loves the most. She is enmeshed with him and is a great enabler, not helping him with his attempts to get clean and sober. In fact, she gives him money when she knows he'll be using it to buy drugs. She even smokes dope in from of him when he is desperately trying to remain clean and sober.
Joel is languishing in a coma and Audrey is resistant to turning off life support. All of a sudden, a secret is exposed that threatens the integrity of the family's beliefs about themselves. As readers, we are privy to the hypocrisies that abound before this secret. They, however, are not. How they deal with this secret, this new information, makes for an interesting situation.
This book is filled with complexities along with sympathetic yet unlikable characters. We are torn between laughing at them or laughing with them. I found myself thinking that many situations reminded me of when I was a child and a friend fell off a bike. I inadvertently found myself laughing even though I didn't want to and even though I wanted to help my friend. It was an automatic response, almost like a hiccup. This book creates the same sought of deep and primitive responses that arise before the facade of civilization has the time to sieve and sort. This is a grand book by a brilliant author.
Summary of The Believers: A Novel
This is a comic, tragic, supremely entertaining novel about one family's struggles with the consolations of faith and the trials of doubt. When Audrey makes a devastating discovery about her husband, New York radical lawyer Joel Litvinoff, she is forced to re-examine everything she thought she knew about their forty-year marriage. Joel's children will soon have to come to terms with this unsettling secret themselves, but for the meantime, they are trying to cope with their own dilemmas. Rosa, a disillusioned revolutionary, is grappling with a new-found attachment to Orthodox Judaism. Karla, an unhappily married social worker, is falling in love with an unlikely suitor at the hospital where she works. Adopted brother Lenny is back on drugs again. In the course of battling their own demons and each other, every member of the family is called upon to decide what - if anything - they still believe in.Domestic Life Books
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