FICTION: The Believers by Zoe Heller Penguin/Fig Tree, 306pp, £16.99
ZOË HELLER'S The Believers, the eagerly awaited follow-up to 2003's Notes on a Scandal, opens with a prologue set at a student party in London in 1962. Audrey, a socially awkward young Londoner, notices a tall attractive man across the room. "He's an American," the woman beside Audrey mentions. "A Jew, you know," she adds. "There was a time," we are told, "when [Audrey] would have lingered to hear what amusing or sinister characteristic the woman attributed to the man's Jewishness - what business acumen or frugality or neurosis or pushiness she assigned to his tribe - and then, when she had let the incriminating words be spoken, she would have gently informed the woman that she was Jewish herself. But she had tired of that party game."
Instead, Audrey speaks to the American, a lawyer named Joel Litvinoff, and the following day the pair arrange "in a bantering, facetious tone . . . [Audrey] had an idea that post-coital conversation ought to be franker, kinder than this", to elope together and get married.
Forty years later, Joel wakes up in his Greenwich Village home with a bad headache. He is scheduled to give the defence's opening argument that morning in the case of The United States of America v. Mohammed Hassani, an Arab American who had visited an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. Joel intends defending Hassani on the grounds that he "travelled to Afghanistan on the understanding that he was to take part in a spiritual retreat". Audrey, however, who is politically ultra-left, maintains Joel ought to be defending Hassani on grounds of "legitimate Arab rage".
Several hours later, Joel collapses on the courtroom floor. The stenographer runs to his aid, journalists rush downstairs to call their newsrooms, Joel's assistant calls an ambulance, but Hassani leans over and politely inquires of his co-counsel how he should proceed with finding a replacement lawyer. Barbed observations of this nature constitute the backbone of this funny and intelligent novel.
The Believersis a portrait of a rich white American family's disappointment, disillusionment, and potential disintegration. It is a novel about humiliation. Like Nabokov's ape that draws the bars of its cage, the Litvinoffs - with their fierce intelligence - readily perceive the constraints ensnaring them. Instead of satirising them and their liberal ideologies, Heller allows the family to satirise itself. When Joel slips into a coma, Audrey's political convictions prove hollow comfort. She stares disconsolately at a Noam Chomsky book. "A few nights before Joel's collapse, she had declined to make love to him because she wanted to read this book." Joel, it soon transpires, has fathered a four-year-old called Jamil with a woman who hangs photographs of her vagina in her living room.
Audrey and Joel's three children are similarly struggling. Karla is overweight, unable to conceive, and drowning in low self-esteem. As a child, she wanted to be a lawyer, like her famous father, but "came to understand that she had horribly overestimated her potential" and ended up a much-abused social worker. She is unhappily married to Mike, a charmless trade unionist who betrays the family's politics by urging union members to vote Republican. Lenny, the Litvinoff's son, adopted when his urban guerrilla mother was imprisoned for trying to blow up a bank, is a layabout stoner.
Rosa, the pretty one, had in the past been "immunized against self-reproach by the certitudes of her socialist faith. All her moral disappointment had been reserved for others - schoolmates who failed to resist the temptation of South African fruit, college acquaintances who were insufficiently concerned about the fate of the Angolan freedom fighters."
However, her "paradisiacal era of righteousness had come to an end . . . she had been thrown back into the ignominious ranks of bourgeois liberalism. She had become just another do-gooder." Rosa attempts to devote herself to Orthodox Judaism, "making herself over as a medieval ghetto-dweller", but fails in that endeavour too.
In its depiction of a successful, wealthy American family turning sour -the children yielding to cultish practices, their potential unfulfilled, the patriarch in decline - The Believersrecalls Roth's American Pastoral, but British Gothic suited Heller better. Gone is the charged atmosphere, the sinister voice, the horribly compulsive trajectory from zenith to nadir, which marked Notes on a Scandal as an outstanding contribution to the form. In its place is a novel that is funny, sad, rich in social observation and pertinent to these times, but that never catches fire as a work of art.
Claire Kilroy's latest novel, Tenderwire, is published by Faber