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The Believers: A Novel Paperback – March 1, 2010

by Zoe Heller (Author)
3.7 3.7 out of 5 stars 511 ratings
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“[Zoe Heller] is an extraordinarily entertaining writer, and this novel showcases her copious gifts, including a scathing, Waugh-like wit.”—New York Times

Best-selling author Zoe Heller has followed up the critical and commercial success of What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal with another tour-de-force on the meaning of faith, belief, and trust: The Believers. Tragic and comic, witty and intense, The Believers is the story of a dysfunctional family forced by tragedy to confront their own personal demons. In the vein of Claire Messud and Zadie Smith, Zoe Heller has written that rare novel that tackles the big ideas without sacrificing page-turning readability.

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  1. Book 3 of 3
    Penguin Ink
  2. Print length
    368 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Publication date
    March 1, 2010
  5. Dimensions
    5.31 x 0.83 x 8 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0061430218
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0061430213
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“A moving, deeply intelligent look at intellectual loyalties-to ideology, religion, family-and the humans attached to them. This is a wonderful novel.” — Joseph O'Neill, author of Netherland

“A beautiful, oftentimes hilarious, razor-precise portrait of a family, a city, and an examination of the eternal and universal urge to embrace something, anything, greater than ourselves.” — Richard Price, author of Lush Life

“Tough, wise and funny. . . . A sustaining, intelligent novel about how the big questions affect and change all our small lives.” — Anne Enright, author of The Gathering

“Profoundly satisfying. . . . Heller injects that difficult-to-pinpoint something-or-other that elevates soap opera to art. . . . The Believers pulses with . . . something deep and lasting and larger than mere story.” — Lionel Shriver, author of The Post-Birthday World

From the Back Cover

When a stroke fells radical New York lawyer Joel Litvinoff, a secret is revealed that forces Audrey, his wife, to reexamine everything she believed about their forty-year marriage. In the meantime Joel's children are struggling with their own dilemmas and doubts. Disillusioned revolutionary Rosa has been drawn into the world of Orthodox Judaism. Karla, a devoted—and married—social worker hoping to adopt a child, is falling in love with the owner of a newspaper stand. Lenny, the ne'er-do-well, faces yet another relapse into heroin addiction. In the course of battling their own demons—and one another—the Litvinoffs must reexamine long-held articles of faith and decide what—if anything—they still believe in.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (March 1, 2010)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0061430218
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0061430213
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.31 x 0.83 x 8 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.7 3.7 out of 5 stars 511 ratings

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Zoe Heller

Zoe Heller

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Customer reviews

3.7 out of 5 stars
3.7 out of 5
511 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Mary M
4.0 out of 5 stars Great humor and loved all the characters
Reviewed in the United States on June 29, 2016
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Great humor and loved all the characters. Enjoyed book from start to finish. This is the first book I have read written by Zoe Heller and I loved her writing style. Good read!
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Marilyn Raisen
5.0 out of 5 stars Yikes! I Know These People!
Reviewed in the United States on June 16, 2010
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I loved this book and everything about it. The prose glides with grace, and Zoe Heller's characters are so true to life. This is charismatic reading at its best. The strange [or not so strange] thing is that I never truly entered the Litvinoff's home, but I carefully observed every one of the main character's activities. I revisited the West Side of Manhattan and was reminded of what life may be like there.

Fortify yourselves before meeting Audrey and Joel Litvinoff. They are left-wing liberals and seem to believe in their causes. Naturally, speak to your physician first, and then take some B Complex, Vitamin C and all the immunity-fighting vitamins you are able to tolerate. Believe me, I know these people. I really do!

The `Audreys' on the West Side have the ability to skewer you. They guess your weight, measure your dress size, judge your tastes, and usually have biting wits. If one wants to be entertained, one generally will dine with these people.

When the reader becomes familiar with Audrey, Rosa. Karla, and Lenny, Joel has been felled by a series of Cardio-Vascular Accidents. We come to know Joel, for the most part, through the women in his life. There is Audrey - there is always Audrey. Then, there are the two daughters Rosa and Karla. Rosa is seeking her roots while Karla is, also, on a journey of her own. Lenny, well, Lenny appears to try to stay 'clean.'

There was an almost tender moment between Audrey and Karla that is embedded in my memory. Audrey makes one statement to Karla and with this one statement, Audrey redeems herself. I could have reached into this book and hugged her! Sometimes, Mothers do know what they are talking about. I am purposely not stating too much. Future readers should really read this with knowing as little as possible. Suffice it to state that the reader will be in the hands of a master storyteller.

I highly recommend this intelligent book. It is filled with pathos, as well as how people may become bonded to their intellectual pursuits.
6 people found this helpful
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Massimo Pigliucci
3.0 out of 5 stars Irritating page turner
Reviewed in the United States on June 19, 2009
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I must admit that I couldn't put down this bizarre novel by Zoe Heller, and yet I kept being irritated by the cartoonish characters and the gratuitously bleak portrait the author presents of most (if not all) of them. There isn't a single person you can possibly like in this book, populated by unethical leftists, an insanely irritable wife, a woman who thinks adultery is the way into someone else's family (and believe me, I ain't no prudish myself), someone who wishes to help disadvantaged children in Harlem but actually doesnt't give a damn about them, and another woman who inexplicably finds her "roots" in an orthodox Jewish community that plainly subjugates women and talks a lot of nonsense about god. Yet, as I said, the book is oddly engrossing. Italians have a term for the sensation I kept experiencing while reading it: "il fascino dell'orrido" which loosely translates as "the attraction of the horrid."
6 people found this helpful
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Clarissa's Blog
2.0 out of 5 stars Could Have Been Good
Reviewed in the United States on June 5, 2010
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Zoe Heller keeps producing books that could have been great if she had only managed to stick to her original purpose without getting distracted. Her novel What Was She Thinking? : Notes on a Scandal: A Novel was not bad at all, and if you think otherwise, it is probably because you were put off by the pretty weak film version. I have just finished Heller's new novel and at first I really liked it. The beginning of The Believers is simply hilarious, and it's no wonder that the book made the Best Books of 2009 list by Publishers Weekly. Heller ridicules - often in a pretty vicious way - a certain type of self-righteous leftists whose holier-than-thou attitude sometimes conceals pettiness and unenviable nastiness. You can get a pretty good idea about the first part of the novel from the following quote: "Karla always spoke of Mike's job as a union organizer with the reverence of a missionary wife describing her husband's evangelical work in Borneo."

Unfortunately, somewhere after the first third of the novel, Heller decided to abandon this line of her story and turned to creating a trite, boring, and repetitive melodrama. The children of the above-mentioned self-righteous leftists are understandably disillusioned by their parents' political agenda and start looking for the meaning of life in drugs, affairs and Orthodox Judaism. Among these three solutions as they are described by Heller, the drug addiction is presented as pretty much the most innocuous one.

We see in The Believers a gifted writer who is somehow too afraid of her own gift to let it flourish. In our patriarchal society, even very talented women obviously have a very hard time believing that they can dedicate their lives to anything other than trivialities. Trivial literature, trivial lives, trivial occupations; women still often see themselves as secondary human beings, secondary writers, and secondary artists. Heller buries her considerable talent in a barrage of trivialities that overwhelm her novel.
9 people found this helpful
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Kindle Customer
4.0 out of 5 stars Quite interesting.
Reviewed in the United States on July 26, 2016
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It is a good read - plausible story, well developed characters, well, mostly. Not a masterpiece by any means, but certainly get your money's worth.
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alternative duck
5.0 out of 5 stars für fans von franzens corrections und anderer moderner familieromane
Reviewed in Germany on August 4, 2010
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Seit Franzen muss ich alle Familienromane lesen - dies ist einer der wirklich guten und packenden Romane zu dieser Thematik. Lustig natürlich nur als Unbeteiligter in einer solch chaotischen Familie - traurig auch, wenn man anfängt mit den Charakteren unter der Familie zu leiden - lange wurde auf die Taschenbuchausgabe gewartet und dann wurde sie in wenigen Tagen und Nächten verschlungen...ein literarischer Genuss
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Sphex
5.0 out of 5 stars The promiscuity of belief
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 22, 2009
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I enjoyed  Notes on a Scandal , but I enjoyed this much more. A strong central current carries you through the novel - with big themes of belief and death and family - with plenty of eddies on either side to slow you down and whirl you around for a moment before you're drawn back into the main flow of the narrative. Zoe Heller writes so well that she manages to create texture and depth seamlessly and effortlessly. The smallest encounters are full of life, even if it is often of the excruciating kind. The brief romantic reunion between Rosa, the younger of Audrey and Joel Litvinoff's two daughters, and Chris, an ex she hasn't seen for years, is toe curling and true. They have a romantic dinner. He drones on about India, she lets it wash over her, thinking, "There was a kind of genius to his dullness". They have sex, he believes her when she agrees that orgasms just aren't that important to some women. She thinks, "How fortunate to be so credulous."

Heller describes their sex act in a single sentence, parsimony not prudery and an accurate gauging of its emotional significance for Rosa. Elsewhere, physical detail is magnificently drawn in, meticulous as a life class. In a world of real people, such attention to detail rarely flatters. The young Audrey meets the student host of a party - "there was something upsettingly pubic about his beard" - while a group of men are distinguished by a "small anthology of body odours". Heller is an equal opportunities writer: observing the women, Audrey "could see their poultry-white legs flashing in and out of the party's undergrowth, like torchlight in a forest." At home, Audrey's mother's "vast bosom strained against the confines of her floral housecoat; her swollen feet spilled over the edges of her slippers like rising dough escaping its pan" (reminiscent of Edith Wharton's unflinching portrait of Mrs Manson Mingott's bulk). There is only the very occasional lapse: "a lone youth at a bus stop, dipping a spidery hand into his steaming bouquet of chips" for me somehow tips over from striking image into distraction.

Belief crops up all over the place, in all sorts of ways. When the young Joel is first introduced to Audrey's parents, her father imagines that because he's an American he must also be a successful businessman: "it seemed pedantic to insist on the truth when Mr Howard was clearly so engaged by the falsehood". This captures the domestic misunderstanding perfectly, but it's also the same social awkwardness any sceptic might feel when asked for their star sign or whether they have tried homeopathy. Heller does not indulge in abstract metaphysical diversions, but she rarely misses a chance to explore how the way we believe is a part of our character. Jean, for example, Audrey's oldest friend, "had been dragging about the same unwieldy burden of a priori convictions... No new intelligence, no rational argument, could cause her to falter from her mission."

Things become overtly religious when Rosa finds "her inner Jew" and undergoes "her own spiritual seduction". Each time she enters the synagogue, she vows to remain detached and rational (her parents have warned her from childhood about the dangers of succumbing "to the idiocy of faith") but again and again she is caught up in the prayer's "austere melody". She is moved, and feels connected to something larger. For some, such transcendence is proof of God. Not for Rosa, and yet she cannot deny being "filled with a mysterious, euphoric sense of belonging". Against the usual grain of the generations, it is her grandmother who reminds her of the family's secular roots: Hannah's parents came to America so that her children "would not have to grow up under the tyranny of religion as she did."

Joel's is the slow tragedy at the centre of the novel, his absence in a coma an ongoing presence. "Every day, it seemed to Audrey, the essence of her husband - the Joelness of him - was receding a little further." He can no longer shake his head "at the dotty sanctity-of-life types who insisted on keeping their loved ones alive when they were no more sensate than parsnips". Joel is now a parsnip, but Audrey cannot pull the plug alone. Their joint bravado about such end-of-life decisions has gone, but she is not crushed. Far from it. In fact, the final pages deliver a surprise in a church (not a lifelong atheist finding God, thank goodness) that is elevating, to use Jonathan Haidt's term - spiritually uplifting without the cant of faith. Zoe Heller's novel entertains and, by opening up a new way of dealing with a human dilemma, also lives up to the true purpose of any novel.
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Francesco Gentile
2.0 out of 5 stars I found this book both pretentious and also psychologically cheap ...
Reviewed in Canada on May 28, 2016
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I found this book both pretentious and also psychologically cheap. Just to give an example: "Her tears had been no different from the ones people cried at sentimental television commercials." Meh
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BlestMiss T
4.0 out of 5 stars You might have heard the hype...and it's not unwarranted.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 23, 2009
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`The Believers', the third novel by acclaimed journalist and author Zoë Heller, was hailed by many a literary critic as one of the highlights of 2008. Having read some of these auspicious reviews I was only too keen to get my hands on a copy. It was the first of Ms Heller's books that I had read and as I was to discover a great introduction to her work.

The novel is set at the turn of the millennium and centres on a wealthy Jewish-American Lawyer Joel Litvinoff, his British wife Audrey and their brood. In truth the book is dominated by irascible and thoroughly unlikeable matriarch, Audrey as she tries to hold everything together when Joel is taken seriously ill. One particular painful revelation throws her life into further turmoil causing her to re- evaluate her ideals - if any-, her marriage and her ideals about her marriage. Then there are the three children. Passive, self-loathing Karla whose marriage to self-important and insincere Mike is going through its own trauma as infidelity and childlessness loom over the horizon. Youngest daughter Rosa, principled ex-socialist revolutionary, is making forays into Orthodox Judaism, which has all but scandalised her family. Finally there's adopted son, Lenny, Audrey's favourite; over grown child and bona fide screw up.

The beauty of `The Believers' is that Heller creates these complex, engaging characters to explore the issue of faith and belief be it in family, society, oneself or a higher power. Heller does not shy away from poking fun at the double standards of many liberals when dealing with a worldview contrary to their own. I get the impression Heller is a liberal herself but open minded in the true sense showing respect for ideas that might differ from her own. Every viewpoint is given equal footing in `The Believers' and she doesn't condemn. (Her sympathy for Rosa in the face of her family's reaction to her possible conversion is a great example of this). Left wing advocate extraordinaire Joel is renowned for championing the causes of the underprivileged and oppressed. However he can't seem to - or want to - stop making choices that hurt those closest to him.

I read one review that described Audrey as feisty. This is an understatement at best and misleading at worst. Audrey is vile tempered and bitter and I admire Heller for having the courage to have such a disagreeable protagonist as the focus of the book. Audrey constantly belittles everyone around her (except of course, Lenny), shows little maternal interest in her other children and her self-confessed `champagne socialism' suggests that worst of all, her convictions are only surface level. They serve merely as tools for her anger, which in turn disguises disappointment with her own lack of achievement. That is, apart from being known as Mrs Joel Litvinoff. Never is this more obvious than in her discourse with her long-suffering, loyal (and only) friend, Jean who inexplicably, puts up with Audrey's abrasiveness without a fight. However Heller still managed to make Audrey's behaviour understandable without trying to justify her. It was not impossible to sympathise with Audrey even though I never did grow to like her. This is the key to what makes `The Believers' work so well. The characters are all wonderfully believable (excuse the pun), 3-dimensional and complicated. This is what transforms an average book to a great one and distinguishes the more talented writers from the rest. With `The Believers' my cup runneth over. Heller articulates elusive human emotions in a concise yet vivid way. Rosa was a personal favourite. Strong-willed, principled and circumspect, by the end of the novel she seems to be the only person who has progressed somewhat in her personal journey, having made the best out of a difficult situation. That's not to say there aren't some major changes for the others but Heller stays true to the nature of the characters she has created and there are no unrealistic transformations by the end of the novel. After all it only covers a time period of less than two years and too many drastic changes would have insulted the readers intelligence.

`The Believers' is well worth the kudos it has received. I leant it to my sister and after reading it obsessively over a few days, she was convinced too. We couldn't stop talking about its many themes and the characters and their motivations. So in a nutshell - no buyer's remorse here.
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Metropolitan Critic
3.0 out of 5 stars Not as good as Notes
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 23, 2012
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The current consensus, at least among amazon uk reviewers, is that The Believers is not as good as Heller's earlier novel Notes on a Scandal. From 126 reviews, Notes' average rating is 4.2, the typical reader hovering between a warm 'I like it' and an ecstatic 'I love it'. From 70 reviews, The Believers now scores 3.6, not reaching the heights of 'I like it' and perilously close to a lukewarm 'It's OK'.

While of course there are such things as under appreciated books, this time I think the crowd is right. I loved Notes; The Believers was...well... OK.

Heller's prose is fabulous and can't be faulted. But whereas Notes has an unfailing narrative tension, the story of The Believers is strangely inconsequential. And there are fewer laughs.

Above all, the characters are so unlikeable. While Barbara Covett in Notes is a monster, there lies behind this a vulnerability that makes her lack of charity understandable. Audrey Litvinoff, the central character in The Believers, is simply a spoilt bitch. Nor are her children, Rosa and Karla, much easier to care about.

To anyone new to Heller I'd say: Read Notes First.

I listened to the audio recording of The Believers, narrated by the Canadian Tara Ward (who, according to the Whole Story audiobooks website 'has been a professional actress since the age of four'). Her American voices are fine, but for Audrey she uses a Dick van Dyke style cockney which did not entirely convince.
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