Beyond Baby Jane

Zoë Heller explores a family of left-wing
atheists and their terrorizing mother in
The Believers

by JULIET WATERS

It’s tough not to be a little nervous about meeting Zoë Heller. Her novels, though highly entertaining and readable, are merciless dissections of women, their vulnerabilities, and their relationships with each other. If you haven’t read one, you may have seen the adaptation of What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal, with Cate Blanchett as a flaky, needy high school teacher who sleeps with a student, and Judi Dench as the hilariously gruesome spinster who falls in love with her.

The Believers is no exception. It centres around the women in a family of left-wing atheists. Matriarch Audrey Litvinoff is a rage-a-holic activist who routinely terrorizes friends and family. But we first meet Audrey 40 years earlier in London, in her more vulnerable youth.

“At a party in a bedsit just off Gower Street, a young woman stood alone at the window, her elbows pinned to her sides in an attempt to hide the dark flowers of perspiration blossoming at the armholes of her dress.”

I check my deodorant twice before setting out to meet Heller. I’m so over-prepared that I have time to Google her once more, and discover that Heller’s father wrote the screenplay for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? the cult classic in which an ageing Bette Davis feeds a pet budgie to an invalid Joan Crawford.

Too bad Davis isn’t around to play Audrey. The role seems made for her. “Like an old lady who persists in wearing the Jungle Red lipstick of her glory days, she had gone on for a long time, fondly believing that the stratagems of her youth were just as appealing as they had ever been. By the time she woke up and discovered that people had taken to making faces at her behind her back—that she was no longer a sexy young woman with a charmingly short fuse but a middle-aged termagant—it was too late.”

My social anxiety is, fortunately, unfounded. Heller is as easy and fun to talk with as she is to read. More Cate Blanchett than Bette Davis. When I bring up her dad’s classic cult film, she launches into an anecdote about going to see it in Bryant Park soon after she moved to New York. “I found myself in a square block, packed tight with gay men who were speaking along with every line. And it was quite funny thinking to myself, ‘Oh if only my dad could be here now.’”

Her dad would no doubt be proud of her own contribution to brilliantly dark representations of women and their cruelties to each other. “Yes, I think it’s probably inherited, to be quite dark and see things in a gloomy palate,” she draws the phrase out and punctuates it with a deep chuckle.

Even if she seems hopelessly drawn to the subject of women, Heller didn’t originally intend to write another book about them. The Believers grew out of an urge to explore the nature of faith. Raised as an atheist, Heller became interested a few years ago in how people transfer all the same mechanisms of religious belief to other systems of reasoning, whether it be science or politics. Atheists she notes are just as vulnerable to disillusionment.

“Their ideas, their beliefs are rooted in as irrational a soil as those of religious believers. And when you kind of pledge your trough to an ideological conviction a lot of it is deeply irrational and you develop the same set of defences as a religious person. So that it doesn’t do to talk about religious people and their blind faith.”

This is something Audrey must confront as her daughter Rosa begins to explore her Judaism by joining an orthodox community.

Anyone who might assume that Heller’s books are driven by the pure sadistic joy of satire is probably wrong. They are driven, it seems, by the urge to vividly understand people very different from us. People we might otherwise turn away from if Heller didn’t find a way to make them so unexpectedly engaging.

THE BELIEVERS BY ZOË HELLER,
KNOPF CANADA, HC, 352 PP., $32