The Believers by Zoe Heller has received a ton of press, most of it good.  I really liked Notes on a Scandal by Heller and I really liked The Believers, which I read yesterday.  Both books are funny, wickedly accurate and irreverent in their assessments of societal fads of sex and culture and politics, and at the same time, both books are firmly grounded in long-established (and very conservative) plot lines revolving around self-deception and deception of others, and the ensuing struggle at self-identification and determination.

But about both books I have the same reservations, which is that people are just not all that bad. Confused, yes, mean often, self-serving by design (God’s or evolution’s), frequently witless of course but through all this stupidity and egoism, people are still decent enough and desperate enough (the two are not mutually exclusive and I’m not using desperate as a pejorative: you’d have to be delusional to think one can survive alone and so we are necessarily desperate to not be alone), yes, decent and desperate enough to seek and to find vital and durable connections with people around them.  In neither Notes on a Scandal nor The Believers do we see any impulses other than self-preservation: they are desperate to survive but they do not have the decency to do it collaboratively with another soul.

Firstborn daughter Karla of the Litvinoff family is the closest thing to a decent human being in the book (and grandma — more about her later) but she is a caricature, the stock character of the fat girl with a heart of gold.  Why make the skinny beautiful daughter the bitch? Why is the mother so impossibly horrible? Do all the offspring have to be miserable? The characters of Audrey and Karla, Lenny, Rosa, and then Berenice are fine for laughing at and sneering at and becoming annoyed with.  But in a book that is trying, I think, to get at what we are doing when we attach ourselves to an -ism (socialism, Judaism, animism, atheism), we should be engaged with the characters, or at least given even the slightest of chances to engage.  We should care about the people in the book and become invested in their choices or rejections of -isms.  Such engagement would make us think about our own choices.  Instead, we are able to laugh and point at these caricatures (not real people), living in caricatured spaces (big messy Perry Street brownstone, personality-deprived apartment in Brooklyn, shared apartment with capitalist and gullible bouncy roommate, milk crate bookcases and peach tea for the black mistress — really, it  was almost insulting how predictable all the housing was).  We walk away from reading this book without being moved at all.  Fine, we are entertained.  But for a book to be great, we need to be more than just pushed along to laughter or snide agreement, we need to be engaged and committed, and thrilled.

Now about grandma Hannah: the only moment in the book when I was engaged, and not just entertained, by the book was at the end when she sings her son a lullaby and kisses him on the forehead to say good-bye.  That was the one connection in the book that was very real, concrete and tangible, visible and moving.  I am a believer in connections.  The Believers is not.