True Believers

It’s the kind of success most author’s only dream of. Zoe Heller’s Notes On A Scandal ticked all the boxes – a critically acclaimed novel, a spot on the 2003 Man Booker short list, and a commercial success that became a hit movie. You wouldn’t blame Heller for trying to recreate that kind of glory, but her latest novel The Believers is a very different kind of book.

“Stupidly, no,” she laughs when asked if she was worried about how this book would be received. “For some reason, when I’m writing, I am curiously cut off from what people’s expectations might be. Once it’s published and I’m about to go out on the publicity trail, then I’m filled with terror, paranoia and anxiety!”
“When I wrote Notes On A Scandal, it seemed to me to have a very small appeal; it didn’t have the makings of something that was going to cross demographics or get turned into a movie. The legendary screenwriter William Goldman once said, ‘Nobody knows anything’ in the context of studios trying to make a hit film, but they keep trying. I think my job as a writer is to write the best book I can.”
The Believers tells the story of the Litvinoff family, a New York family with impeccable left-wing credentials and famous friends. When Joel, a radical socialist lawyer of the old school suffers a stroke and an unexpected secret from his past is revealed, the family begins to unravel.
The Believers questions idea of belief, both religious and political – beliefs that seem rational and those based on faith.
“Early on I’d come across an article that scientists were trying to locate the ‘belief’ gene, the gene that would predispose you to faith in something,” Heller says. “The thing that appealed to me was that this could be a metaphor for what one knows from life. Some people want to believe and have a natural aptitude for fending off sceptical thoughts while others don’t. What I wanted to write about was the mechanics of belief and what you do when you receive new intelligence which threatens the great edifice of your belief system.”
“The other thing I had in mind were all those 1930s communists and fellow travellers who had invested themselves in the idea of the great Soviet experiment. Then the Soviet show trials happened and with varying speed they had to think again and relinquish their faith, which I think must have been a hugely painful process.”
At the centre of the novel is Audrey, Joel’s wife, a foul-mouthed harridan. In many ways she’s a sympathetic character – just not one you’d particularly like to meet.
“Ever since I brought the book out I’ve been busily defending her!” says Heller. “I’m full of affection for Audrey, firstly because I think she’s quite funny and she’s quite astute at times. But more important than any of that, she’s someone who’s painted herself into a corner, behaviourally speaking. The image I had was one of my young girls having a tantrum, and it’s true of adults too – you know you’re behaving incredibly badly and you’d like to step out of it, but you don’t quite know how to, certainly with any dignity.”
While Joel’s secret life comes to light and Audrey’s faith in her marriage is slowly tested, Rosa, her daughter, struggles with religious faith. After being disillusioned with socialism Rosa has been flirting with Orthodox Judaism, to which she feels a deep ethnic connection. She embraces religion emotionally but she questions it intellectually. Rosa’s desire to believe in a God causes consternation in her atheist family, but Heller is keen to show that supposedly rational beliefs can be adhered to with the same kind of faith as religious ones.
“I’m an atheist myself so I’m broadly sympathetic to the cause, but atheists often suggest that people without religious beliefs are entirely rational creatures and base their beliefs and political ideas on rational grounds, and I guess my point is, no that’s not the case. All of us, base a lot of what we cling to, on tribal beliefs or on irrational emotional reasons and find it hard, even in the face of good evidence to jettison those beliefs because they’re constitutive of who we are.”
The central question of The Believers is what happens when beliefs are sorely tested. Without wishing to give the plot away, Heller was aghast to learn that some readers thought that foul-mouthed Audrey had somehow changed her spots at the end of the novel.
“I’ve only written three novels but this is the first time where there has been a drastic distinction between what I intended and how it has been read by certain people. I do pay lip service to the idea that the book can go off into the world and everyone can make of it what they will, but when I read the these readings of the book, I kind of started wanting to have seminars about how it should be read – No, no! That’s wrong!” she laughs.

The Believers is published by Fig Tree