The Believers Zoë Heller Fig Tree, 320pp, £16.99

Stepping westward

The first paragraph of Zoë Heller's third novel is the most laboured stretch of writing in the book, but its dullness, although risky, is reassuringly deliberate. An attractive young typist called Audrey is at a party of young but otherwise unattractive socialists in Bloomsbury in 1962 and, like the weather outside, seems to be waiting for something to happen: "Now, the soupy air was crackling with immanent brightness and pigeons had begun to huddle peevishly on window ledges. Silhouetted against the heavy, violet sky, the Bloomsbury rooftops had the unreal, one-dimensional look of pasted-on figures in a collage." Audrey avoids inhabiting a novel full of pathetic fallacy and a life of typing in Camden by meeting and marrying an American civil rights lawyer called Joel Litvinoff. Their whirlwind romance is too quick to be romantic, and it's somehow not surprising that the novel's next stop is New York in 2002. Audrey is now a hardened 59-year old activist and Joel, at 72, is a famous liberal lawyer about to start a trial defending an Arab-American accused of terrorist activities. Just as this begins to read like the beginning of a 9/11 novel, Joel collapses from a stroke in the courtroom and spends the rest of the novel in a vegetative coma.

The Litvinoffs' three adult children are Karla, a social worker who works in a hospital and hates being fat; Rosa, who used to be a socialist but after living in Cuba for four years is now, to her parents' horror, interested in Orthodox Judaism; and Lenny, whom the Litvinoffs adopted when he was seven. All three have problems: Karla is unhappily married to a pompous union organiser, Rosa wants the rituals of religion without believing in God, and Lenny is a drug addict who goes in and out of rehab.

A triter novel would focus on the contrast between Audrey and Joel's ideals and their troubled children, but Heller has written a much more interesting novel about "the gift for conviction" which the Litvinoffs all share. Convincingly, none of them acknowledges their simil arities of temperament, choosing instead to patronise the belief systems they rigidly defend.

There's an unusual equality of attention to each of the characters (the exception being Lenny, to whose interior life we have little access), but the biggest mystery is what has happened to Audrey since 1962. When we first meet her at the party, she resembles Middlemarch's Doro thea Brooke in her naive desire to improve herself: "There was a girlish, renunciatory streak in her that positively relished Martin's dullness." By 2002, she is a swearing battleaxe who treats Joel with huge amounts of scepticism on principle - "Jadedness was Audrey's default pose with her husband" - and she takes almost every opportunity to undermine her daughters. One of the best features of The Believers is Heller's refusal to hand out personality tags when we meet each character for the first time. By setting up the action and letting the family members interact with each other, the reader feels like an observer, and when, later, we are allowed a glimpse into what each character actually thinks of themselves, the results are revelatory and the third-person narrator earns her omniscience instead of seeming merely overeager to share.

It's just when Audrey seems at her most monstrous that we catch her wondering: "How had she ended up like this, imprisoned in the role of harridan?" Her realisation that a facade, however convenient, is hard to get out from is surprisingly moving: "She was no longer a sexy young woman with a charmingly short fuse but a middle-aged termagent." How - ever, since the free indirect style means that we're not quite sure if this is Audrey or the narrator's thought, it remains bracing enough to avoid sentimentality.

After two novels in the first person, the biggest advance in technique for Zoë Heller as a novelist is the third-person narrator. The reviews of her first novel Everything You Know were surprisingly poor, given that its narrator there sounds remarkably like the much-praised narrator of Notes on a Scandal. Both are enjoyable, accomplished tricks of balancing voice with plot. The Believers is a much more complicated achievement and, although it's always an easy thing to say, it might be interesting to wonder why, unlike its predecessor, it is nowhere near this year's Booker Prize, a virtue it shares with Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children (an equivalent novel in tone, setting and skill from 2006). It's tempting to think that a serious-funny work like The Believers doesn't seem serious enough. A more interesting question, though, would be why some of our best British novelists (Heller, Messud and perhaps Zadie Smith as well) have been going through a process of becoming less British, and whether the next Great American novel is going to be written by a formerly British woman.

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