Zoe Heller – The Believers (March 2009)

Zoe Heller – The Believers

ISBN 9780670916139

(ABC BOOK REVIEW)

Well-known author of Notes on a Scandal has published her latest novel The Believers.

Summary:

British girl Audrey meets Joel in the sixties, and moves with him to the United States. They start a family together in New York, and the story then picks up in 2002. Joel is a lawyer and while at work he collapses and is taken to the hospital, where he remains in a coma. The family tries to copy with this sudden dramatic event, and each play their own part, as they have done all their lives.

Full story:

The book starts with Audrey and Joel, who meet in the sixties, and move to the United States, and get married. After Joel has a heart attack, the family story starts. Each of the characters goes through his, or her, own journey, and together they form a familiar (dys) functional family.

Audrey is the egocentric mother, who faces a challenge when her husband’s former girlfriend/mistress Berenice shows up, with a son.

One by one we meet the children, Karla, Rosa and Lenny, who each have their own lives, but are in a love/hate relationship with their parents.

Karla is bullied by her mother, but accepts her role, and she is afraid to stand up for herself in her marriage with Mike also. Their marriage is not a happy one, but they are trying to conceive, Mike especially. Karla meets Khaled, the man from the newspaper stand, and starts an affair with him, or something that looks like it. She receives from him the loving attention she was so hungry for.

Rosa is the independent intellectual daughter who unexpectedly has an interest in the Jewish religion, much to the dislike of her atheist family.

Lenny is the troubled drug addicted son, who is being pampered by his mother, who doesn’t want to let him go. In the end, when he finds help for his problem, she seems to struggle to let go of him, even if it his in his interest to let go of her. Lenny unexpectedly turns out to be the lucky one in the end.

My opinion:

The Believers is again one of those novels that want to focus on a lot of people in one novel. The narrative voice remains the same, which helps the reader to keep the whole collection of lives together. Because of the fact that all the pages are shared with so many lives, in the end it gives (only) a slice in time of this family. The novel doesn’t go as deep in the individuals as I would like.
However, Zoe Heller is a rising star on the fiction horizon, especially now that one of her novels that had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, has been made into a film. I expect that she will produce several more novels that will get a lot of attention of press and public, and quite probably will be nominated for a lot more prizes in the future.