This sociopolitical comedy of manners concerning a radical lawyer
in a coma is beyond the novelist's satiric command.The main problem
with the latest from the British Heller (What Was She Thinking?
Notes on a Scandal, 2003, etc.) is that it lacks focus. It could
have focused on Joel Litvinoff, a famous activist attorney
described by those who despise him as a "rent-a-radical with a long
history of un-Americanism," but he's unconscious in his hospital
bed for the bulk of the book. It wants to focus on his wife Audrey,
like the novelist a British-born transplant to New York, whom the
older Joel seduces in London when she is 18 and who remains married
to him for 40 years. The problem is that Audrey is the least
compelling character, with little explanation as to how she has
become such a doctrinaire radical harridan (much more rigid than
her husband), a "champagne socialist" hypocrite and unloving mother
to her two daughters. Maybe Karla and Rosa, the daughters estranged
from each other, could have provided the focus. The former is a
heavy, good-hearted woman who must choose between her loveless
marriage and an improbable affair. The latter is more attractive
and resents the superficiality of her beauty; she is an extremist
in everything she does, having returned from four years in Cuba to
embrace, or at least investigate, the Judaism her parents long ago
rejected (and which runs counter to her own feminism).
Unfortunately, their stories only connect at the bedside of their
comatose father, a center that cannot hold. Adopted son Lenny, from
an even more radical family, mainly provides comic relief as his
mother's marijuana supplier, until he cleans up. What promises to
propel the narrative is Joel's deep secret, revealed while he is
unconscious, but even that seems on the periphery, before its
unlikely resolution provides something of a climax.Tom Wolfe might
once have had vicious fun with such material, but this novel lacks
the edge to make it sharper than soap opera. (Kirkus Reviews)
Zoe Heller's darkly comic third novel, The Believers explores a
family pushed to its limits. When Audrey makes a devastating
discovery about her husband, New York radial lawyer Joel Litvinoff,
she is forced to re-examine everything she thought she knew about
their forty-year marriage. Joel's children will soon have to come
to terms with this unsettling secret themselves, but for the
meantime, they are trying tot cope with their own dilemmas. Rosa, a
disillusioned revolutionary, is grappling with a new found
attachment to Orthodox Judaism. Karla, an unhappily married social
worker, is falling in love with an unlikely suitor at the hospital
where she works. Adopted brother Lenny is back on drugs again. In
the course of battling their own demons and each other, every
member of the family is called upon to decide what - if anything -
they still believe in. 'Profoundly satisfying. No other novel would
readily stand in its stead . . . pulses with thematic and
intellectual content . . . Heller's prose is clean, warm and smart'
Lionel Shriver, Daily Telegraph 'Astonishingly well-observed and
stunningly written, a subtle, funny family farce . . . in its
thundering confidence, The Believers is the work of a writer at the
top of her game' Guardian Zoe Heller is the author of three novels,
Everything You Know, Notes on a Scandal, which was shortlisted for
the Man Booker Prize in 2003 and The Believers. The 2006 film
adaptation of Notes on a Scandal, starring Cate Blanchett and Judi
Dench, received four Oscar nominations. She lives in New York.
General
Imprint: |
Penguin Books
|
Country of origin: |
United Kingdom |
Release date: |
April 2009 |
First published: |
July 2009 |
Authors: |
Zoe Heller
|
Dimensions: |
198 x 129 x 21mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback - B-format
|
Pages: |
305 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-14-102467-7 |
Categories: |
Books >
Fiction >
General & literary fiction >
Modern fiction
|
LSN: |
0-14-102467-4 |
Barcode: |
9780141024677 |
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