the believers: another exercise in psuedo-feminism · May 5, 03:59 PM by j.
Here in Boston we have this elite little group called the Bad Girls Book Club. We drink wine, eat cheese, and talk text. Female-penned prose, usually. The Believers, by Zoë Heller, was on the chopping block a few months back, and while I hadn’t planned on writing about it at first, a small thing happened to make me change my mind.
While recently practicing my pioneer spirit on the treadmill (see: previous post), I was simultaneously enjoying a certain shameless act that, in my opinion, should only be done when there are workout machines in the vicinity: reading tabloids. Now, I don’t remember which one it was, but I do remember that I came across a book review of The Believers that deeply, deeply annoyed me. It was only a paragraph long, mostly negative, and relatively unmemorable but for the line that basically read: the novel ends with Karla (one of the Litvinoff family daughters) embarking on a completely unbelievable and ridiculous love affair that puts the finishing touch on the book’s absurdity. I admit this may be a slightly exaggerated paraphrase, but as I mentioned, the review annoyed me. In reaction, I rolled up the stupid magazine, stuffed into the treadmill’s cup holder, and upped the speed of the machine.
I found The Believers to be a flawed, enjoyable read. Despite the fact that I disliked pretty much all of the characters, I found myself unable to put the book down. I think Heller herself would be for the most part content with such a reaction. In this interview I learned that she doesn’t necessarily put much stock in the idea that characters have to be likable and/or relatable. I mildly agree with this. One doesn’t have to necessarily like every character he or she encounters (think of Raskolnikov), but it helps if one cares what happens to them. In the case of The Believers, I kept reading because I wanted to know just that, but in the end I was left disappointed. Events did indeed happen, just not at the behest of any of the characters. Well, except for Karla.
A short synopsis to help extricate my point. At the novel’s outset, the patriarch of this upper-middle class liberal New York family suffers a stroke, leaving the women around him – a wife, two daughters, and a soon-to-be-not-so-secret lover – to flounder in his absence. There are two sons as well: Lenny, thirty-something, adopted, struggling with drugs, and Jamil, four years old, mixed race, illegitimate. Consequently, neither son has true access to the family, and what with Joel in a coma we are left with the Litvinoff women – mom, Audrey, and her two daughters, Karla and Rosa – as the three varying perspectives and protagonists.
My main problem with the novel was that these major female characters neglect to take their fates into their own hands. In short, they are discontent and remain so for the majority of the novel; Audrey with her lack of sympathy toward everyone save her husband’s faceless left-wing causes; Rosa with her radical past, her present job at an inner city program for teenaged girls, and her flirtation with Judaism; Karla with her blockhead husband and thankless career as a social worker. Eventually, however, it is the latter – Karla, the most unlikely of the three candidates – who begins to embark on what turns out to be real change through her unexpected relationship with Khaled, an Arab shopkeeper. Hence, why that article made me so cranky in the first place.
Still though, the novel left me wanting. While its biting satire was often witty and extremely well-written, it was also empty, and didn’t really make me feel anything, which, in my case, is kind of why I read. I like the premise of three women left to struggle aimlessly when the man around whom they orbit is snatched away, but overall I did not feel the depth of this struggle. Not even when the Litvinoff women are faced with Berenice, Joel’s secret lover, and their child together, Jamil, do they allow their lives to be shaken in a meaningful way, something that is wonderful only in its potential. This door of dramatic intrigue is opened, but unfortunately, the author chose to keep her characters from walking through.
my ántonia: the feminist farmer let the infinite summer begin: week one