Reading Notes on Zoë Heller's The Believers

One of the most things wonderful about joining a group of bloggers dedicated to literature is that there are ample opportunities to have mistaken impressions corrected and to pick up now (rather than 10 years from now) on a book well worth reading.  As you may all be aware, this has happened to me with respect to Zoë Heller's The Believers.  These are notes on reading in progress and so do not constitute either a definitive nor even really a review in progress--more impressions.

Let me start by saying that at this early stage (about one-third of the way through) I've formulated an impession of the book that might be summarized by saying that it is the story of the family of Mrs. Jellyby.  Mrs. Jellyby, you may recall, is one of the characters in Bleak House.  She is intensely involved in various philanthropic enterprises to the extent that her family is largely neglected.  One gets the impression that a kind of Jellybyism affects the Litvinoff family.  Audrey, the matriarch, and Joel, the patriarch, are very much guided by a kind of blinded altruism that colors all that they do.

from The Believers
Zoë Heller

Audrey's attachment to her dogma was a bit like that, Jean thought. For decades now, she had been dragging about the same unwieldy burden of a priori convictions, believing herself honor-bound to protect them against destruction at all costs. No new intelligence, no rational argument could cause her to falter in her mission. Not even the cataclysmic events of the previous September had put her off stride for more than a couple of hours. By lunchtime on the day that the towers fell, when the rest of New York was still stumbling about in a daze, Audrey had already been celebrating the end of the myth of American exceptionalism and comparing the event to the American bombing of a Sudanese aspirin factory in 1998. The speed with which she had processed the catastrophe and assimilated it to her worldview had been formidable in its way and at the same time, Jean felt, a little chilling.

"Talking of religion, " she said now, hoping to change the subject, "how is Rosa? Is she still . . . ?"

Audrey's expression darkned. "Oh yeah," she replied drearily, "still off dancing the hora. It's all very gruesome."

And so it goes.  Audrey is from England and Jewish.  As a result, her patterns of speech and behavior are quite different from what I am used to in the United States.  I can't think of anyone in the US, Jew or Gentile, who commonly uses the word "gruesome."  And this adds a bit of a flavor to Audrey that is both unusual and quite palatable--perhaps one of the few things that is palatable about this woman who has become a slave to her own dogma.

Well, there are problems in the offing as noted in this earlier passage.

source as above

At dawn, on the top floor of a creaking house in Greenwich Village, Joel and Audrey lay in bed. Through a gap in the curtain a finger of light extended slowly across their quilt. Audrey was still far out to sea in a sleep. Joel was approaching shore--splashing about in the turbulent shallows of a doze. He flailed and crooned ad slapped irritably at his sheets. Presently, when the rattling couplets of his snore reached one of their periodic cresecndos, he awoke and grimaced in pain.

For two days now, he had been haunted by a headache: an icy clanking deep in his skull, as if some sharp-edged metal object had come loose and were rolling about in there. Audrey had been dosing him with Tylenol and urging him to drink more water. But it wasn't liquids or pills he needed, he thought, it was a mechanic.

And soon enough, Joel finds himself in the hospital.

As you can see from the excerpts, the writing is of exceptional quality--the metaphors and similes beautifully drawn and reminiscent of some of the better work of John Updike in this field.

There is one last, beautiful moment I want to share and I do this at the risk of it being something of a spoiler--so caveat lector.

source as above

And there was something sweet, she thought, about the way they handled the Torah--undressing it and dandling it and parading it about as if it were an adored infant. The whole thing had a faintly preposterous, Masonic quality, but it was not, she conceded, without its anthropological charm.

At the end of the Torah service, just as the scroll was being replaced in the ark, the congregation had begun to sing a slow, mournful prayer. Rosa, who rarely, if ever, responded to music without knowing and approving of what is was about, was surprised to find herself moved.  Something in the prayer's austere melody was making the hairs on her arm stand up.  A thought came to her, as clearly as if it had been spoken in her ear. You are connected to this. This song is your song. When next she glanced down at the siddur lying open in her hands, she was amazed to see the little ragged suns of her own teardrops turning the wafer-thin pages transparent.

This is so beautifully captured, so perfectly on target that it nearly brought me to tears--one of those rare moments in writing that is as moving (almost) as the event being described.  Moving, at least, to one who has experienced the same sense of coming home as Rosa is experiencing here.

And as a coda to this moment let me add a passage a little bit further on

source as above

In the synagogue now, the service had come to an end. From her seat in the balcony, Rosa watched an old man hobbling out of the sanctuary. He was so bent over with age that he looked as if he were searching for lost coins on the floor. She thought of her father in his hospital bed, still as an effigy on a tomb. After a moment, she lowered her head and began to pray.

No great drama here, but tremendous beauty.  If the book continues in this lustrous, moving, and even amusing way, it will bear out the witnesses who have acclaimed it one of the best books of recent years.  It really has been a wonderful read so far, and I have no reason to expect that it will diminish as I continue.

Another point that I think tremendously important is that writing need not be edgy and highly experimental to be effective.  There is nothing in the prose here that a well-educated seventh grader couldn't read (although perhaps some things that it would not be appropriate for said seventh-grader.)  There is, in fact, if anything, a return to conventions that are often stripped away in the modern story--adverbial modifiers to speech indicators, a kind of omniscience in the narrator that is not necessarily unreliable, and other touches that are just good, solid writing--using the tools of the language purposefully to maximum effect--metaphors, similes, adverbs, simple, well-crafted sentences that sing internally.  Truly prose that begs to be noticed for not being ostentatious or noticeable.

So now, most sincere thanks to Mr./Professor Myers for his encouragement to return to a back abandoned on the shelf for bad jacket copy. (Perhaps also Tony should be thanked here--I read so many blogs, I don't recall where else I saw a review of this book, but it was recent and highly favorable.) I would have missed a wonderful read--even if the rest of the book plummets--I still would have missed what I've encountered so far, and it really has to be some of the best writing I've read in a long time.  Right up there with this year's choice for me--Yiyun Li.