The Believers
By Zöe Heller
Harper
$25.99

In post-9/11 New York City, Joel Litvinoff, the legendary attorney and radical activist, has been struck down by a severe stroke. As he lies unconscious in a Manhattan hospital room, his family hovers around his unresponsive body, disoriented and emotionally paralyzed. Joel’s renowned ideological dynamism and organizing energy have disappeared, leaving the family edifice swaying.

In her most recent novel, The Believers, Booker Prize-nominated author Zöe Heller introduces us to a family come undone—abandoned, as it were, at a domestic Ground Zero. Just as the landscape of Heller’s New York is haunted by the space left where the Twin Towers once stood, the geography of the colorful Litvinoff family is haunted by Joel’s ruined body, a body which, as the novel progresses, emerges as a source of doubt in the lives of his wife and children. The Believers paints a compelling portrait of the fragility of faith, a picture of belief that can collapse as quickly and as easily as a human body or a tower. Joel’s family, like the citizens of the city in which they live, must learn to function in a world where all walls fall and all faiths fail.

Well-known for her vivid yet often unlikeable characters, Heller births a whole tribe of crooked, broken individuals. The “believers” struggle with the maintenance of belief, the loss of belief, the recovery of belief and the redemption of unbelief. Drawn with a keen eye and a wry sense of humor which frequently borders on satire, the Litvinoff family emerges as a motley collection of disturbingly realistic characters. Heller’s satire—cutting, yet compassionate—rings with a particularly personal tone. The story is, in many ways, an autobiographical one. Heller herself was raised by leftist parents in a secular Jewish home, and the fictional Litvinoff clan bears a striking resemblance to the author’s family. In an interview with The New York Times’s Patricia Cohen, Heller describes her mother as a Labor Party activist with a “Stalinist inclination,” someone who might consider it “perfectly sensible for the Soviets to invade Afghanistan.” There was a great amount of pressure to “tow the party line,” she recalled in another interview. “My mother once told me, ‘there are only two ways you could disappoint me, darling, by becoming a Tory or becoming a nun.’”

In The Believers, Heller explores the nuanced interaction of a family very similar to her own, with their own strict, dogmatic liberalism. Joel and his spectacularly caustic wife Audrey are staunch social progressives, adamantly secular Jews, and pioneering “experimental” parents. From the beginning of the book, it is obvious that Joel’s personality provides a necessary center of gravity that unifies the whirling, clashing personalities of his family members. Though relational drama abounds, the structure of the family remains intact; while Joel is present, the center holds.

In his little tribe of “wandering Jews,” Joel stands as the patriarch of a new kind of Israel, a contemporary Abraham. In his family he creates a nation of “true believers,” who evangelically preach the Litvinoff gospel. On weekends, instead of going to church or synagogue, the family gathers around the kitchen table to listen to Joel sermonize upon some doctrine of liberal orthodoxy:

On this Sunday the subject of his lecture was the ethics of armed struggle […] Joel strode about the kitchen, messily breaking and beating eggs. He was wearing his standard breakfast attire: a pair of leather slippers, flattened down at the back by his giant gray heels, and a balding terrycloth bathrobe. From time to time, the two sides of the robe would flap open like theater curtains, revealing the proscenium arch of his groin and a terrifying glimpse of pubic froth.>

On such occasions Joel parades his virility as well as his ideological power. The reader soon learns that Joel’s success as a patriarch, pseudo-religious leader, and public man is closely related to his sexual prowess. In a classic feminist interpretation of the male ego, Heller links Joel’s political and personal potency to his sexual “success.” Joel is an infamous flirt and is chronically unfaithful to his wife Audrey. His philandering is almost as well known as his politics; his romantic exploits (if not his descendents) are as “numerous as the stars in the heavens.”

But even as Joel attempts to mold his world and his tribe into perfect temples of liberal orthodoxy, the structure of this “house of Israel” has already begun to crack. The children—the “bearers of the promise”—refuse to tow the line. Rosa horrifies her parents with a sudden interest in Orthodox Judaism. Karla marries a man whose political opinions directly contradict their own. Lenny, the only son, lapses in and out of addiction, chronically unemployed and politically apathetic.

Underneath the facade of a “super-successful progressive family,” the Litvinoffs struggle with frustration, dysfunction and failure. In the same way, Joel’s sexual strength is challenged even as his domestic life fragments. In the first chapter he is inordinately disturbed by a young woman’s rejection of his advances. “The woman looked away disdainfully. He felt a moment’s befuddlement at the failure of his gallantry and then an urge to take the woman by the scruff of her neck and give her a good slap.” For Joel, his sexual and parental failures suggest the possibility of some deeper personal and ideological collapse. And this vague foreboding soon comes to fruition: minutes after the woman’s rejection he suffers from a stroke, collapsing on the court-room floor. 

Though it isn’t until after Joel’s removal that the family structure actually begins to crumble, the fatal structural flaws have been latent from the beginning. Heller illustrates the instability of the Litvinoff belief structure by exploring literal structures—especially houses and apartments—with literal instabilities. Broken domestic spaces parallel broken faith: sterile apartments point to sterile relationships, and, as Joel notices early in the novel, filthy living quarters seem to suggest “a failure of will, a moral collapse of some kind.” Homes crumble even as the Litvinoff system crumbles and the faithful begin to doubt.

Heller uses Audrey’s particular failure of belief—paralleled by her domestic failure—to explore the dynamic of ideological collapse. Throughout the novel Audrey’s Greenwich Village mansion slips into filthy abandon. Months pass and the airless rooms begin to fester as left-over food rots on top of the TV and trash collects on the floor: “The mess was epic. A sinister brown substance was oozing from one of the three gaping trash bags. The filthy linoleum sucked at Karla’s shoes.” In Joel’s absence Audrey cannot muster the energy necessary to maintain her home.