Come,Ye Faithful

Her husband Joel Litvinoff is a superstar lefty lawyer who has made a career defending political pariahs,and his more worldly politics is leavened with impulses of self-interest. Joel is a recognisable combination of good humour,testosterone and worldly,middle-aged radicalism — he views his wife’s stands with indulgence,partly because he thinks it is a “feminine prerogative to have unreasonable political opinions”.

Though he spends much of the novel in a coma,he cuts a vivid figure — making French toast on weekends and lecturing his kids on armed insurgency,in his wildly swinging bathrobe. He,as Audrey discovers,also had a secret life and an illegitimate child,sending her carefully nurtured idea of herself and her marriage into a tailspin.

Meanwhile,the Litvinoff kids (heavy-handedly named Lenny,Karla and Rosa) are dealing with their own dysfunctions. Lenny is reeling from substance abuse and thinly established boundaries with his mother. Karla is diffident,obliging and on bad terms with pleasure (there is some gratuitous fat-girl comedy at her expense). Rosa has inherited her mother’s “girlish,renunciatory streak”,and after a stretch in Cuba,she turns to religion,to her family’s shock and horror.

Incidentally,Rosa Litvinoff reminded me of another Rosa — from Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter,also trying to shuck off the heavy gravity of her father’s Communist,anti-apartheid politics and find a space where the personal is inviolably the personal. Of course,Zoe Heller’s novel is a snarky social comedy,while Gordimer’s book is a psychologically probing piece of haute literature. But the parallels between the two are striking enough to call up Heller’s bluff on the question of belief. She does not turn her considerable powers of observation on the content of her characters’ political convictions,and the novel is not a send-up of any specific ideology as much as of the idea of living in thrall to tinny unified theories of the world. The very vividness of her characters begins to feel forced after a while,because they can be boiled down to one or two overriding qualities.

But the cartoonishness ends there. The Believers is an immensely fun and frictionless read,and Heller has a tremendous gift for description,like girls’ “poultry-white legs flashing through the party’s undergrowth,like torchlight in a forest”. She can verbalise the delicate tremors coursing beneath conversations,and from the slam of stall doors and roar of hand dryers in a bathroom to the preening and jostling in men’s conversation,everything in her novel is tinily observed,to perfection.