The Believers
By Zoë Heller
Penguin Fig Tree £16.99, 256 pages
FT Bookshop price: £13.59

Zoë Heller’s first novel Everything You Know was briskly dismissed by the critics. Her second, Notes on a Scandal, was a contender for the Booker Prize. This third, The Believers, is another leap forward in strength and depth, while the writing remains light, zestful and very particular to Heller.

She is that rare thing in contemporary literature, an ironist. With take-it-or-leave-it zeal she delivers damning yet kindly verdicts on the peculiarities of human behaviour. “Joel was by and large a sanguine man. He regarded his sunny temperament not as an accident so much as a determined political stance.”

Not that we need bother too much with Joel, a leading human rights lawyer, husband to the ultra-leftist Audrey and father to Rosa and Karla. Soon he is to end up in hospital in a coma, leaving his family to face the difficulties of existence alone. Belief patterns are jolted: Rosa abandons socialism for Orthodox Judaism. Karla, the married one with low self-esteem, lets herself be seduced by an uneducated Egyptian newsagent. But Heller concerns herself for the most part with how Joel’s wife Audrey – one of the most richly bitter, bitchy, unkind mothers to surface in contemporary literature – meets her comeuppance.

The family stands at Joel’s bedside. “Joel lies motionless on the bed, his white hair pressed flat against his skull in damp yellowish strands.” Karla has the audacity to smile. “Oh for God’s sake, don’t stand there looking like a smacked arse. You’re the one who’s meant to have the bedside manner,” her mother says. When Rosa remonstrates, Audrey retorts, “Get the fuck out of here ... go on, piss off!”

Well, Audrey’s upset. What is remarkable about Heller’s writing is how she can make this monster if not exactly likable, at least sympathetic. We feel for her as her vision of her perfect marriage unravels. It takes decades. Joel, a New Yorker, met the young Audrey in London back in 1962, when she had fallen in with a seedy group of political activists. “The future was rushing up at her now. They would live together in an ‘apartment’. In a skyscraper perhaps. They would be comrades in the fight against injustice, sharing the action and passion of their time. They would go on marches ... ”

Over the years Joel’s nature softens into self-interested indifference, while Audrey’s stance on politics hardens. “He didn’t mind. In fact he enjoyed the irony of being chastised for his insufficient radicalism by a woman to whom he had once had to explain the Marxist concepts of ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’.” It is Joel’s capacity for enjoyment, as much as Audrey’s deep seriousness, which turns out to be most damaging to the children.

Yet how animated and sparky the book remains, for all its stirring, murky depths. And how apt the detail – Karla munches an almond croissant as she carries her frugal low-calorie lunch to work; not surprisingly, she has an eating disorder. Lennie – adopted by Joel and Audrey in the hope of subverting traditional models of family life – sets his hair alight while smoking crack.

Metaphors and similes surprise, and are rarely self-conscious; instead they are light, casual, brisk and only occasionally annoy. Girls’ legs, flashing out of the party’s undergrowth, like torchlight in a forest. Joel, “just another listee in the vast army of the sick and dying”. One warms to the novel: the ink of human kindness runs in Heller’s veins, in spite of, rather than because of, the honesty of her vision.

Fay Weldon’s new novel is ‘The Stepmother’s Diary’(Quercus)