Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A sardonic picture of a family, 13 May 2009
The Prologue is set in London in 1962. I found it both unconvincing and could find no relevance to the rest of the book, which is set in New York in 2002. The central characters are the Jewish Litvinoff family: Joel, a radical lawyer; his English-born wife Audrey, even more left-wing than he is; their two daughters Rosa and Karla; and their adopted son Lenny.
These are all very well drawn. Joel is likeable; but for most of the book he is in a coma in hospital. Audrey, now 59, is rude, foul-mouthed and irascible; her one redeeming feature seems to me to be her love for her husband and, inexplicably, for the 34 year-old drug-addicted Lenny. She certainly does not extend any affection to her own daughters, who are at the receiving end of continuous criticism and wounding remarks; she is so intolerably unpleasant that one wonders what her friend Jean can possibly see in her. Karla, in a loveless marriage, is unhappy, overweight and obsessively placatory. Rosa, who has a good deal of her mother's truculence, has lost her belief in the family socialism and, to the disgust of her ferociously secular parents, is looking for a new identity by learning about orthodox Judaism, though she resists much of what her teachers (with considerable eloquence) tell her about the value of what to her is the absurdity of orthodox rituals.
The story reads easily and sustains one's interest throughout; Heller writes beautifully; her observations are sharp and often witty; the frequently abrasive dialogues are dynamic; and at the very end all those unhappy characters seem to have found something that gives their lives some meaning.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Absorbing, captivating, utterly engrossing, 28 May 2009
I simply don't understand some of the lukewarm reviews below -- this book is completely wonderful. It's a funny, sharp, thoughtful meditation on family life and moral order & identity with some fantastically well-realised, brilliantly comic and touching characters. It's about a radical lawyer in New York and his British wife (a wonderful comic monster) and their forty year marriage and it's also about their two daughters and adopted brother, each trying to make sense of their lives.
This is by far the best novel Zoe Heller has written, it's ambitious, it's savage, but it's also humane at the same time. If you liked NOTES ON A SCANDAL you should adore this.
This is a massively entertaining book and one with huge intelligence too.
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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
American family saga for the post modern world, 13 Jun 2009
`At a party in a bedsit just off Gower Street a young woman stood alone at a window, her elbows pinned to her sides in an attempt to hide the dark flowers of perspiration blossoming at the armholes of her dress.'
The Believers opens with a prologue set in London in 1962 - just a year before sexual intercourse started according to Larkin - and sex happens on a first date within the first fifteen pages of the wonderfully written prologue which juxtaposes the sad provincialism of Audrey's parents with the possibilities of moving to New York with American Joel Litvinoff. With Joel she imagines being a comrade 'against injustice' and `sharing the passion and action of their time.'
The prologue is a fantastic opener; the writing is funny and sharp and there is a real sense of excitement and possibility. Heller's wit and clear eyed observation is evident in the opening pages - another woman joins her at the window as she is watching Joel and starts to speak to her about him. `Audrey nodded warily. She had never cared for conspiratorial female conversations of this sort. Its assumption of shared preoccupations was usually unfounded in her experience, its intimacies almost always the trapdoor to some subterranean hostility.' Audrey moves away when the women points out that Litvinoff is a Jew. `There was a time when she would have lingered to hear what amusing or sinister characteristic the woman attributed to the man's Jewishness........and then, when she had let the incriminating words be spoken, she would have gently informed the woman that she was Jewish herself. But she had tired of that part game. Embarrassing the prejudices of your country men was never quite as gratifying as you thought it would be; the countrymen somehow never embarrassed enough.'
The rest of the novel takes place forty years later in a post 9/11 Manhattan and start very promisingly. Joel is still fighting the good fight, still married to Audrey, and some tension is introduced with some other family members. And then at the end of the first chapter Joel is struck down and spends the rest of the novel in a coma as his dysfunctional family circles around him.
Heller quotes Gramsci at the start of the novel `The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned' and it's true that each of her characters explores their illusion and their belief systems in the course of the novel. For Audrey it's about being on the radical left as a comrade of Joel, for her adopted son Lenny it's about drugs - their daughter Rosa has abandoned Cuba and is exploring Orthodox Judaism whilst the good but ugly daughter Karla stops being a good wife. They are not very sympathetic characters but then neither was Barbara in Notes on a Scandal and yet that was mesmerising if less well written. So, it's good subject matter and very well written but somehow, for me, it never delivered on the promise of that prologue and opening chapter - perhaps because Audrey was unrecognisable as the young girl in the window
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