The Believers

By: Zoe Heller

Narrated by: Andrea Martin

When radical New York lawyer Joel Litvinoff is felled by a stroke, his wife, Audrey, uncovers a secret that forces her to reexamine everything she thought she knew about their 40-year marriage. Joel's children will soon have to come to terms with this discovery themselves, but for the meantime, they are struggling with their own dilemmas and doubts.

Rosa, a disillusioned revolutionary, has found herself drawn into the world of Orthodox Judaism and is now being pressed to make a commitment to that religion. Karla, a devoted social worker hoping to adopt a child with her husband, is falling in love with the owner of a newspaper stand outside her office. Ne'er-do-well Lenny is living at home, approaching another relapse into heroin addiction.

In the course of battling their own demons - and one another - the Litvinoff clan is called upon to examine long-held articles of faith that have formed the basis of their lives together and their identities as individuals. In the end, all the family members will have to answer their own questions and decide what - if anything - they still believe in. The Believers explores big ideas with a light touch, delivering a tragic, comic family story as unsparing as it is filled with compassion.

©2009 Zoe Heller (P)2009 HarperCollins Publishers

Critic reviews

"One of the best novels of the year." ( Sunday Times)

grating, but really great

the characters in this book are exTREMEly flawed. they are by turns bitchy, self-righteous, jealous, gluttenous, proud, and worse...the living embodiments of the seven deadly sins and a whole host of venial ones. but the writing is so gorgeous and the scenes are so finely drawn that even those awful, awful people became a pleasure to read about. i came to respect and even admire audrey, the family matriarch, despite her cruel tounge. she's screwed up her children so royally that they're barely-functioning adults, and yet i found myself rooting for her time and again. if you can appreciate the ones you love despite their monumental flaws, then this book is definately worth your time.

Great story about unlikable people

without spoiling, this book was wonderful. It made me cringe, it made me upset, happy, hopefully. The characters all make terrible decisions, it's all very human.

Great writing, not-so-great narration

I have two complaints abut this book: it was too short. And I'm not wild about the narrator.

Zoe Heller brings us a family in which each character is so distinct and so clearly crafted, you truly feel you get inside each of them.

The narrator is the main drawback: take, for example, the matriarch of the family, around whom everyone else cautiously orbit. She is originally form the UK. Yet reader Andrea Martin has given her sort of Jewish Brooklyn sound. Martin gives clear voice to the daughters and to slacker Lenny, but the rest of the characters seem to have the same loud, overbearing voices. It did not make sense to me, for instance, that one character hails from Fort Worth, and is highly educated, but speaks in obnoxious Brooklynese that belies her background.

Having said that, this is a compelling story with great characters, all of whom must reckon with painful familial truths, including infidelity, drug abuse, and plain, old fashioned emotional cruelty. These characters grow, learn, change in very honest, real ways.

All in all, if you like good, well-written contemporary literature, get this book!

Good book, poor reading.

If you could sum up The Believers in three words, what would they be?

Leftist Sixties Kunstler

What did you like best about this story?

The characters. Also I have an interest in politics and Judaism in the 1960s.

Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Andrea Martin?

I love Andrea Martin as a performer, but she had an unsteady command of various accents (British, Brooklyn, Jewish, Manhattan). The family's voices were heavily Jewish and Upper West Side, but the family lived downtown. The voices were inconsistent.

If you could take any character from The Believers out to dinner, who would it be and why?

The older sister seems like a nice person who has lived with many impossible people.

Any additional comments?

I tried to imagine the words on the page behind the voice.

Who would want to hang out with these people?

I was excited about this book because I truly enjoyed Zoe Heller's last book. However, the characters in this family are so nasty and dysfunctional, so completely unlikeable, that I couldn't bear to spend any more time in their wretched company. Their ugly family exchanges could not hold my interest and I had to put the book down.

Book spoiled by reader

I haven't yet finished the book because the reader is nearly unbearable. Every character sounds stereotypically Jewish. She can't do a British accent to save her life.