Not Quite a Believer

Zoe Heller's The Believers, published two years ago to general critical acclaim, handles, one character at a time, the unraveling of the insufferable Litvinof family – a privileged clan of supposedly radical leftists luxuriously ensconced in a Greenwich Village townhouse.

The characters subject us to various intensities of annoyance. At the top of the heap in this regard is the clan's mother and the novel's central protagonist, Audrey.

Audrey is the least tolerable kind of leftist: theoretically in a fight for “the people” while simultaneously preoccupied with her own greatness – the cleaner does not show her enough deference, in her opinion; she daydreams of her husband's luxurious, star-studded funeral; she pretends money means nothing to her but resents those who have more. There is nothing to like about Audrey. She's mean to her daughters, she's borderline cruel to her best friend. Worse, the reader is left ignorant about why she's so unlikeable until page 190 (this excerpt is long, but necessarily so):

Once upon a time, her brash manner had been a mere posture – a convenient and amusing way for an insecure teenage bride, newly arrived in America, to disguise her crippling shyness. People had actually enjoyed her vituperation back then …

But somewhere along the way, when she hadn't been paying attention, her temper had ceased to be a beguiling party act that could be switched on and off at will. It had begun to express authentic resentments: boredom with motherhood, fury at her husband's philandering, despair at the pettiness of her domestic fate. She hadn't noticed the change at first. Like an old lady who persists in wearing the Jungle Red lipstick of her glory days, she had gone on for a long time, fondly believing that the stratagems of her youth were just as appealing as they'd every been. By the time she woke up and discovered that people had taken to making faces at her behind her back – that she was no longer a sexy young woman with a charmingly short fuse but middle-aged termagant – it was too late. Her anger had become a part of her.

It's a good passage. Unfortunately, it's the only one in the book your really need to read on the topic of Audrey. You've now got Audrey nailed.


And even given this explanation, Audrey's character remains unjustifiably rude, mean-spirited, curmudgeonly. You don't want to read a book about a person like this (or at least I didn't), you want to put her in her place, show her how entirely useless she is by ignoring her, which you can't do if you keep reading. It's hard to get into a book when really you just wish the protagonist would go away.

I realize that this begs a certain question about whether characters have to be likable in order for a book to be good. And obviously, the answer is no. Despicable protagonists in great novels abound: Humbert Humbert (Lolita), John Self (Money), Alexander Portnoy (Portnoy's Complaint). Even Jay Gatsby is not exactly likable.

A literary device (or several) must exist, then, that takes an unlikable human and makes him or her compelling. The contenders:

Satire: Satire has always been a tenuous concept for me; when I think about it for too long, I stop understanding what it means or being able to know it when I see it. For reference's sake, satire is:

A literary composition, in verse or prose, in which human folly and vice are held up to scorn, derision, or ridicule.

Which seems oversimplistic to me. Satire, I think, is a portrayal of someone or someplace in a way that exposes its flaws. And the best satire exposes this by being true to human nature. But it has to be a well-rounded portrayal -- simply holding up human folly and vice to scorn, derision or ridicule is not enough. Many political analysts do that every day, but it ain't satire.

So if a portrayal of an unlikable person achieves satire, we applaud it because we are in cahoots with the author in exposing some ridiculous trait of the human condition, and therefore, we find the character not only tolerable but entertaining. The Believers was called satire by many a reviewer, but I'm not quite following that logic.

Show Don't Tell, Duh: If Heller had shown us the root of Audrey's sour temperament rather than told us outright in one self-contained passage, we might have been able to relate to it. We've all had a bad day, succumbed unjustifiably to a grotesque mood, taken it out on a stranger or on the person closest to us. This is Audrey's entire life, yes, but there is a trickle of her life in ours, and had her perspective been better laid out, we may have found ourselves more prone to view her life through it.

Empathy: Could it be that those authors listed above – Amis, Nabokov, etc. – had an ego-driven empathy for their characters, while Heller has no sympathy for this tyrant of a woman she has created? And empathy from an author is necessary to produce empathy in the reader? Heller remains detached from her characters throughout, which causes us to remain detached from them throughout. If we are to like unlikeable characters, we need to be brought a whole lot closer to them.


Anyway, I didn't dislike this book as much as the above review likely suggests. But I didn't actively like it either. Yes, this is a pretty basic third-grade level analysis (“I liked the part where ...”), but it explains where The Believers falls on the love-hate spectrum. Didn't dislike it enough to throw in the towel, but wasn't driven to plow through it either, and I think that has something to do with the points outlined above.

*Interior shot above is Uma Thurman's former dining room. That seemed relevant.