Not Much Sympathy for Zoë Heller’s Characters, but a Little
Understanding
By PATRICIA COHEN
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)

“I don’t write books for people to be friends with the characters,” Ms. Heller says of her new novel, “The Believers.” “If you want to find friends, go to a cocktail party.”

It’s not always a good idea to see how your books are consumed,” Zoë Heller said after a recent online chat with readers about her new novel “The Believers,” which is due out Tuesday in the United States. “It’s kind of like seeing how sausage is made.”

Ms. Heller was a bit dismayed to learn that some readers found “there were no sympathetic characters,” that “they didn’t want to spend time with them,” or that they “were not inspiring in any way.”

That isn’t necessarily surprising. She is, after all, famously adept at depicting unpleasant characters like the obsessive English schoolteacher, Barbara Covett, in “What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal,” her 2003 novel that was later turned into a movie with Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench. Ms. Heller, 43, prefers insight to amiability.

“I don’t write books for people to be friends with the characters,” Ms. Heller said as she tucked into a spartan brunch of a boiled egg and seven-grain toast. “If you want to find friends, go to a cocktail party.”

She is tall, in tight gray jeans, her hair tied back in a ponytail, with big hoop earrings that reach almost to her prominent chin. “The point of fiction is not to offer up moral avatars,” she added, “but to engage with people whose politics or points of view are unpleasant or contradictory.”

Besides, Ms. Heller pointed out, even the new novel’s most caustic personality, Audrey Litvinoff, the mother of a Jewish, left-wing clan living in Greenwich Village, is at least funny.

At least. Released in Britain last fall, “The Believers” prompted a reviewer to write in The Guardian that Audrey is “a hilarious, foul-mouthed harridan: part monster, part inspiring law unto herself, her approach so excoriatingly direct that the reader waits in wincing glee for her next spitting and swearing tirade.”

Audrey is the English wife of Joel, a famous radical lawyer in the mold of William Kunstler, a man whose charisma and forceful personality keeps his family orbiting around him in a gravitational pull comprising ideology, reverence and loyalty. When he suffers a devastating stroke, everyone starts to fly off, confusedly, in a different direction.

The idea for the novel came from a news article about scientists who thought they had found a gene that might be responsible for people’s beliefs, Ms. Heller explained. Regardless of whether it exists, she saw “the belief gene as a metaphor” for those who unquestioningly accept authority, whether in religious, political or personal affairs. “All of us invest our identities in what we believe,” she said. “It’s hard to concede anything to the other side.”

As Audrey’s friend Jean describes it: “There were some people with a gift for conviction — a talent for cutting a line through the jumbled phenomena of world affairs and saying, ‘I’m in: this is my position.’ ... All of the Litvinoffs had it, to some extent. It was a genetic thing, perhaps.”

Each family member is ultimately forced to confront the flaws or fallacies of a deeply held belief, but it is the struggle of Audrey’s daughter Rosa that is at the novel’s center. After faithfully drinking the left-wing Kool-Aid and spending four years in Cuba, the disillusioned Rosa finds herself inextricably drawn to Orthodox Judaism, a turn that horrifies her vehemently atheistic parents.

To Ms. Heller people who manage to break away from an entrenched belief are “heroic.” Imagine how the Communists of the 1930s and ’40s felt when they learned the truth about Stalin, she said, “how agonizing it was for those people to find that Uncle Joe was not the person they thought.”

“I imagine Alan Greenspan was feeling a similar sense of loss when he admitted the market is not infallible,” she added.

Ms. Heller has experience with left-wing ideologues, conflicted Jews and larger-than-life personalities. She describes her own mother as a rather glamorous Labor Party activist with “Stalinist inclinations.” She was the type who would think it “perfectly sensible for the Soviets to invade Afghanistan,” Ms. Heller said. (Her parents died when Ms. Heller was in her 20s.)

Her father, Lukas Heller, was a screenwriter (“The Dirty Dozen” and “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”); he was apolitical, an “equal opportunity cynic,” she said. Although her father was Jewish by birth (her mother was a Quaker), Ms. Heller was raised as an atheist in North London. She remembers her grandmother, a German Jew who spent time in Spain during the Civil War, telling her, “There’s only one way you could disappoint me — by becoming a Tory or a nun.”

For Ms. Heller, the most difficult part of the novel was depicting Rosa’s slow religious conversion, particularly since the character is so intellectually fastidious. As an atheist, she said, she bent over backward to avoid coming off as condescending or snooty, and her portrait of Orthodox believers is both sensitive and sympathetic. If anything, she said, “I erred on the side of giving them an easy ride.”

When Ms. Heller was in her 20s, she lived in New York and wrote a Bridget Jones-type newspaper column about her single-girl exploits for a British newspaper. For more than a decade she has been with the screenwriter Larry Konner. Three years ago they invited all their friends to Ms. Heller’s 40th birthday party promising a special surprise entertainment. It turned out to be their wedding ceremony.

The couple own an apartment in TriBeCa, but they and their two daughters have been living in the Bahamas for the past 18 months or so. They were briefly in New York, crammed into a snug hotel room, to take care of getting their younger daughter into kindergarten.

At one point Ms. Heller’s family tramped into a restaurant after a short shopping excursion. The girls presented their mother with a big white mug — because she likes a big cup of tea.

Now that she’s a parent, Ms. Heller said, “I’m slightly more sympathetic to parenting mistakes,” adding that she is certain her parents never obsessed over how they were raising their children the way her generation does.

“The Believers” is told through the eyes of both parents and daughters. “Trying to write in the third person and juggle several characters was challenging,” she said, explaining that it may be a Puritan streak that compels her to struggle with something new.

Readers have interpreted in different ways how the characters end up, and not always in line with Ms. Heller’s intention. But she acknowledges that once you write something, you no longer control it. “It goes out in the world,” she said, “you have to let it go.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLING LIST
Paperback Mass-Market Fiction
Published: February 20, 2009
(COURTESY: nytimes.com)
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THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING LIST
Paperback Nonfiction
Published: February 20, 2009

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