Unlike Notes on a Scandal, which had a tight, slightly claustrophobic first-person narrative, Zoë Heller's new novel is populous and full of competing views. Self-deception is again an important theme. The New Yorkers in The Believers hold strongly to certain creeds - socialism, atheism, the possibility of a second chance. They also obey certain minor doctrines: that adopting a baby might save a marriage, that a long illness prepares people for their loved one's eventual death, and that “it's the great female mistake to take sex personally”. They are practised in conversational pieties such as “I feel your pain”, and “You need a hug”, and they follow specific texts, from the Jewish rules for purification of unclean women to self-help books called Mindful Eating and Making Love, Making Babies. Amid these false discourses the faithful grapple unhappily with their human problems.

At the centre, more unhappy than most, are the old radical Litvinoffs: Joel, a celebrated left-wing lawyer, Audrey, his uncompromising wife, and their grown-up children - Karla, a failed dieter, Rosa, a law student turned voluntary worker, and Lenny, their adopted son, a drug addict. When Joel collapses in court and remains in a coma for six weeks, the family's romance of itself as a joyous tribe is finally shattered. Rifts grow larger and secrets are uncovered, chief among them the existence of a woman in Joel's recent past, Berenice Mason.

Under this pressure, Karla finds escape from her self-righteous husband in the arms of a middle-aged Egyptian newsagent who works in the hospital where she is a social worker. Rosa discovers Judaism to her mother's disgust, while Lenny tries leaving home again. And all the time Audrey grows angrier, her language more offensive. This dislikable, deluded woman, who we first meet in the touching prologue at a party in Bloomsbury in 1962, is a monstrous figure of aggressive motherhood who sees her children as “trainee humans”, “inadequate adults”. In any dialogue, Audrey has the last word; her speciality is to give and take offence at the same time with remarks such as “Be my guest”. It is only towards the end that we come to see her properly.

Much of the novel has the form of a sophisticated soap opera, in which a familiar cast reacts to a series of domestic shocks with bouts of uninhibited truth-telling. Minor characters, such as Karla's husband Mike, Lenny's lover Tanya, and Audrey's friend Jean, reappear regularly to provide another angle on the drama. There are some comically awful scenes: arguments between Audrey and her daughters, rebarbative sessions with doctors and nurses and a hideous family birthday party that ends with the company breaking down the bathroom door to discover Lenny on the lavatory in “an opiate stupor”. Other episodes include a visit to the correctional facility where Lenny's mother, a former member of an underground group, has been held for 27 years, an antiwar demonstration in Central Park, and the show put on by some of the girls from the East Harlem GirlPower Center where Rosa works - a dance display by 12- year-olds called Malisha, Chantelle, Danielle and Chianti, who bump and grind to the beat of “Gimme your booty, cutie”. Joel's memorial service provides a finale of expansive sincerity; taking place in New York's largest cathedral, it features Native American drummers, a rap singer, the announcement of the Joel Litvinoff Foundation and the singing of the Internationale - words provided.

Heller's plotting and chronologies are meticulous (she is precise about dates, ages, sums of money, medical details and the geography of the city that her characters cross and recross). She observes clothes and food (a potent force in these American lives) and fills in her characters' past histories. Holding a careful balance between comedy, drama and pathos, she sets up climaxes and cliff-hangers, providing incidental ironies when we are enjoyably able to see disaster coming. The Believers is more mature and ambitious than her first two novels, viewing present-day moralities from a wide angle and creating a warm, funny and thoughtful fictional universe.

The Believers by Zoë Heller
Fig Tree £16.99 pp308

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