Ties that Bind: A Review of "The Believers" by Zoe Heller

One of the unanticipated joys of viewing a harrowing movie filled with bizarre behavior and dysfunctional characters is the clean wave of normalcy that descends upon the moviegoer as he/she trudges up the murky walkway toward the sweet light of day. "I may have my moments," the viewer muses, "but that woman was CRAZY."

I experienced a similar feeling when I completed the last page of Zoe Heller's "The Believers." I approached the rest of the day with light-footed elation, deliciously free of the self-imposed angst borne by each member of Heller's beleaguered NYC family, the Litvinoffs.

The patriarch of Heller's fictional family is Joel Litvinoff, a self-described radical leftist attorney and civil rights worker who attained his national celebrity through tireless work on numerous high-profile legal defense cases. Heller reveals the least about Joel, who suffers a major stroke in the first pages of the book and remains in a coma thereafter, but that is probably to his advantage, since the more you know about this Manhattan family, the less you like them.

Joel's battles against the establishment may have originally been fueled by altruistic ardor, but Heller hints that Joel has become enamored with his own celebrity in recent years. He needs constant public attention to energize his leftwing passions and enhance his cult-like status, a status that in turn facilitates his favorite hobby: he's a womanizer. One would like to feel sorry for his wife, Audrey, but she has quite a few flaws of her own. It's highly probable that she married Joel to escape the dismal fate endured by her English parents, who live in a tatty Chertsey apartment that smells of boiled cabbage and cat pee. No longer the attractive and saucy feminista of her youth, Audrey has become abrasive, foul-mouthed, and bitter in middle age. Her sole friend, Jean, endures verbal attacks from Audrey that would incite bitch-slaps from anyone less saintly.

The Litvinoff children are no sweethearts, either. The oldest child, Karla, is an overweight social worker who is maddeningly weak-spined and complacent in the face of outrageous verbal abuse from Audrey and rude inattention from her husband. She may as well print "Kick Me" on her behind. Karla's sister, Rosa, is a stiff, self-righteous do-gooder who has turned to helping urban girls in Harlem after becoming disenchanted with Castro's Cuba, where she lived for a time. As Rosa's job at "Girlpower" slowly sours (in truth, she doesn't like the girls, not even one), she begins to flirt with Orthodox Judaism, a move that is sure to inflame Audrey, a militant atheist. The youngest Litvinoff, an adoptee named Lenny, is a drug-using lay-about who somehow manages to wheedle money and favors from Audrey in inverse relation to his bad behavior; the more outrageous his transgressions, the more Audrey gives him, a fact that rankles his sisters and consigns him to the status of permanent manchild.

"The Believers" can be read as a scathing social satire, but Heller's underlying themes are nothing to smirk at. Each character is trapped inside a forced persona that he or she can't seem to shed. Joel has become so dependent upon national notoriety that he is determined to chase it to the point of exhaustion (and stroke). Audrey has played the role of adoring wife and quirky iconoclast for so long that she is totally at a loss as to how to define herself when Joel's transgressions come to light. Karla is boxed into a social work job and a miserable marriage because Joel and Audrey convinced her at an early age that she was "the nurturer" in the family. Rosa has modeled her adult life after her father, only to discover that his ideology has left her adrift and longing for something more. Lenny has allowed himself to sink into a destructive co-dependency with his mother that threatens to kill him unless he cuts and runs altogether.

Each family member seeks an external anchor, a belief system that will reveal his or her raison d'etre once it is adopted and internalized. Heller subtly explores whether such a quest is an effective strategy or a harmful barrier to true self realization. Each Litvinoff resolves his or her existential crisis differently, and in refusing to reveal her bias one way or another, Heller forces her readers to address the issue for themselves. "The Believers" is a tragicomic and thought-provoking book that will leave you feeling relieved that you're not headed to the Litvinoff household for dinner any time soon.

"The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao:" A Literary Trifecta

In "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," Junot Diaz artfully weaves three distinct narrative threads into a prize-winning novel that offers three books for the price of one.

The novel's main character, a massively overweight, nerdy Dominican American whose romantic passion for women is simultaneously humorous and heartbreaking, is one of the most original characters to appear in fiction in recent years. The reader first meets Oscar at the tender (and relatively thin) age of seven. Oscar's prepubescent love life is blossoming; he's romancing two girls at once, and his reputation as a schoolyard Romeo has spread throughout the Dominican barrio of his New Jersey town. His bliss is cut short, however, when the girls refuse to share his affection and force him to choose between them. The victor promptly dumps him for another suitor, and Oscar's love life begins a downward spiral that will persist into a dateless and despondent adulthood.

Depression prompts Oscar to overeat and lose himself in comic books, fantasy novels, and marathon rounds of Dungeons and Dragons. Despite the repeated efforts of his sister Lola and his best friend Yunior to educate Oscar about the proper way to seduce the opposite sex, he stubbornly persists with obsessive personal habits and un-hip hobbies that guarantee his lovelorn isolation. College finds Oscar holed up in his dorm room, chubbier than ever, writing what he hopes will be the next "Lord of the Rings" and fantasizing about his latest crush. Readers will find themselves fuming at Oscar's hapless inertia while also hoping that something wonderful will finally fall his way. What can life offer a bounteously romantic soul wrapped in an unappealing body? What should it offer? What do we owe to ourselves and others regarding such issues? These deep questions, together with Diaz's skillful and original development of Oscar's character, could carry the book without the aid of any additional material.

Nevertheless, "Oscar Wao" offers the reader a second story line that is equally engaging. Many readers may find Diaz's exposition of the complex relationship between Oscar's mother, Beli, and his sister, Lola, to be the most gripping element of the book. Beli's violent verbal and physical attacks on her own daughter are maddeningly inexplicable until Diaz gradually informs the reader about Beli's past life in Dominica, a tragic tale that could fill a book of its own. Beli and her daughter are oil and water in some respects (Beli's romantic entanglements have bordered on the fatally obsessive, while Lola's approach to "love" is about as cool and calculating as it gets), but it is their wild tenacity of spirit that locks them into combat; each despises the other for a stubborn ferocity that she refuses to recognize in herself. Diaz explores this mother/daughter relationship expertly, guiding the reader through Beli and Lola's tangled web of love, fear, resentment, and hope with a story that could stand alone on its own merits.

That being said, Diaz offers the reader yet a third narrative lens through which to enjoy the book. "Oscar Wao" offers an expansive, multi-generational history of the Dominican Republic in general and an account of the diabolical 30-year reign of President/dictator Rafael Trujillo Molina in particular. From the time Trujillo rose to power in 1930 until he was assassinated in 1961, he ruled the country with a ruthless cruelty that was feared throughout the Caribbean. Oscar and his family are fictional characters, but Trujillo was real, and Diaz doesn't pull any punches as he depicts the ruinous effects of Trujillo's rule upon the Dominican people. Trujillo's tentacles reach out to adversely affect every member of Oscar's family, touching everyone from Oscar's scholarly Grandfather Abelard to Oscar himself, who finds himself in a deadly confrontation with Trujillo's legacy long after the man himself is dead.

This book, a well-deserving winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, is an excellent choice for your to-read list in 2009, whether you're interested in exploring Dominican history, mother/daughter relationships, or the imaginative, love-addled brain of a Star Wars fan named Oscar.