The Believers

Zoe Heller's second novel, the 2003 psychological thriller Notes from a Scandal, projected its author to Booker-shortlisted, film-adapted prominence. Heller's achievements lie in the emotional distance with she maintains between the reader and her protagonists. None of her central characters are particularly likable; in fact, they are generally deeply unpleasant, often disturbing, self-seeking creations hovering on the fringes of total chaos. It is because of this, even speaking as one who frequently abandons novels because of a lack of personal engagement, that Heller is such an indomitable force. In The Believers, she refuses to please her reader in the common way, but with an assured style delivers an utterly gripping study of an unhappy fractured American family railing against each other and the destruction of the false picture they have painted of themselves.

The Litvinoff family at the centre of The Believers is a seemingly alluring group maintaining at its centre the father Joel, a celebrated civil rights lawyer and campaigner. His wife Audrey has spent her life upholding the rigid principles of social activism and liberalism while bending and swaying to the standards and needs of her famous husband. When Joel is felled by a stroke into a coma in the middle of a high profile case, the fall-out is spectacular as the myths which have shored up life until that moment unravel for Audrey, her mournful daughters Karla and Rosa, and adopted feckless son Lenny.

Forced back on their own devices, each member of the family begins their own release in rebellious snatches at stability. To the outrage of her 'liberal' mother, freethinking Rosa becomes drawn to Orthodox Judaism; the overweight unhappily married Karla, who absorbs the family's jibes without complaining, embarks on a tentative affair with hospital newsagent Khaled while Lenny, denied the usual mollycoddling devotion of his mother, no longer attempts to conceal his heroin addiction. The three reveal disorientation beyond measure matched only by their childish naïveté that shows, for all their educated liberal upbringing and loud parental posturing, a complete lack of familial heart.

It is only when Joel is pushed vegetating to the wings that Audrey fully unleashes herself upon the story. Like a wild cat, hissing and spitting and relentlessly mean, Audrey dominates all around her with her abusive torrents. Both entertaining and excruciating, her vicious outbursts conceal moments of genuine sadness: when faced with Berenice Mason's evidenced claims that her long-term affair with Joel resulted in a child, her vitriol is punctured in realisation at what she has become: 'How had she ended up like this, imprisoned in the role of harridan? ... Somewhere along the line, when she hadn't been paying attention, her temper had ceased to be a beguiling party act that could be switched on and off at will.'

While Heller does not save her characters with hackneyed life-affirming epiphanies, neither does she abandon them to their ruin. All characters are allowed moments of understanding at their potential to change: even incompetent Lenny finds peace in abstemious hard work. There is no neat conclusion to the lives of the Litvinoffs or to the novel itself, which may leave some readers feeling unsatisfied, but a fitting comment on the bitter hatreds and desperate loves that can easily co-exist in the many layered complexities of family.