It may be cold again as you read this, but it’s 75 degrees outside as I’m writing these reviews, so forgive me for being in a springtime mood. Given that frame of mind, here’s a look at a couple of new books that deal with rebirth, passion and change, three perennial spring themes and pursuits.
Author Zoe Heller has a way with less-than-likable characters. Her talent for using her wit and sparkling intelligence to insinuate unpleasant, screwed-up jerks into readers’ consciousnesses was clear in her last novel, What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal. In her new book, The Believers, she takes that approach to a new level.
Scandal, short-listed for the 2003 Booker Prize and later made into a gripping movie with Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench, features two teachers who establish a new friendship that gradually dissolves in a tangle of sexual intrigue as they learn each others’ secrets. In The Believers, Heller again delves into the effects of secrets, this time with an entire family as protagonists, and religion as the underlying conflict instead of sex.
Audrey and Joel Litvinoff are self-important New York baby boomer leftists who’ve tried hard to hand down their beliefs to their kids. Joel is a lawyer defending a suspected terrorist, and Audrey is his uproariously brusque and abrasive wife of 40 years (who delivers more side-splitting insults than you’d normally see in a year’s worth of reading). Early on in the story, Joel has a stroke and falls into a coma, after which old secrets come out of the woodwork, and Audrey comes to terms with the fact that she and hubby have essentially lived a life that was, in many ways, a lie.
Joel’s, er, new absence ironically frees gentle daughter Karla to re-examine her own life. Stifled most of that life by the brash Audrey, and now slogging her way through marriage to a man who approaches sex with her “like a child squaring up to the task of eating his spinach” — no wonder she’s fallen in love with someone else — Karla, like Audrey, faces the fact that things she once believed in are now null and void.
The central figure in The Believers is daughter Rosa, an unhappy woman who is looking fiercely for something to believe in; something, that is, besides her parents’ political principles and self-righteous disdain for religious faith. When she announces that she’s begun attending an Orthodox Jewish synagogue, everyone in her family practically explodes, but she carries on. Rosa’s struggle for some kind of stable belief becomes the crux of the novel, and it’s where Heller shines, getting inside the mind of a cosmopolitan, modern woman who is simultaneously deeply attracted to Orthodox Judaism and repelled by the ostentation and kitsch that often come with traditional organized religion. No matter how much she resists the trappings of religion, though, she’s “filled with a mysterious, euphoric sense of belonging … something had happened to her, something she could not ignore or deny.”
It’s not every day that an author turns the tables of modernism and writes intelligently about a modern person ditching atheism for faith, but Heller pulls it off brilliantly, using her, and her readers’, modern outlook and humor to examine one of humanity’s oldest, most powerful drives, the urge to live for something greater than — or at least other than — ourselves.
Col. Percy Fawcett was a renowned early 20th century British explorer, widely considered almost superhuman. In April 1925, Fawcett, his 21-year-old son Jack and a friend of his son began an expedition into the depths of the Brazilian Amazon region, searching for what the colonel called the City of Z. Others had previously called it El Dorado, or the City of Gold. Hundreds of earlier expeditions had searched for it, and thousands had died looking, but Fawcett’s reputation was such that his quest was met with wide interest and even enthusiasm. Long story short, Fawcett & Co. never returned. Since then, however, hundreds of expeditions have been launched, and hundreds have died, hoping to find Fawcett’s remains or Z, or both.
The latest such trek was taken by author David Grann, a staff writer for The New Yorker, who happened to read one day that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World was inspired by Fawcett’s exploits. Trouble is, Grann has bad eyes, hates camping and loves air conditioning, but he suddenly found himself consumed by Fawcett and his adventures, so he made arrangements, launched his own investigation and the end result (other than the expected ones of finding neither Fawcett nor Z) is a terrific true adventure tale, in the guise of a compelling study of the British explorer, the Amazon, and the power of obsession to reconfigure entire lives. Grann believes he figured out what happened to Fawcett, and his conclusion is as reasonable as any, but it’s also beside the point. The main attractions here are Fawcett’s — and Grann’s — obsessions, and the latter’s talent for creating a gripping story.
This article appears in Mar 17-24, 2009.
