27. The Believers by Zoe Heller The Believers has been on my TBR list since I read this detailed review . To be honest, I'm not really sure how I feel about it, after looking forward to it for so long. The novel tells the story of a Socialist family in New York after the famous lawyer father, Joel Litvinoff has a stroke. I especially enjoyed the mother Audrey, who is, as Myers says, "perhaps the most memorable and perfectly realized bitch in fiction." She's cruel, unyielding, tactless-and familiar. This particular breed of cruelty reminds me of matriarchal figures both from fiction and real life, women whose survival strategy is to insist on having everything on their own terms, screw everyone else, especially their children. We get glimpses into her humanity when her oldest daughter Karla remembers her mother once showing her a picture of herself as a fat child and confessing that Karla got her tendency toward obesity from her. Audrey continually harps on Karla...
Life, Books, and SFF