D J Taylor
Feet of Clay
In a recent Bookseller interview, Zoe Heller could be found fretting about the likely public response to feisty Mrs Audrey Litvinoff, the female lead in The Believers. It was possible, Heller conceded, that plain-speaking Mrs L (who at one point responds to a woman bringing news of her lawyer husband’s courtroom stroke with ‘Yeah right love, I don’t need the police procedural’) might be a little too rebarbative for the general taste. After three or four hours spent in Mrs Litvinoff’s company I can confirm that her creator’s instinct is correct. She is indeed a nightmare, her succession of strops, sulks and brutal insults matched only by her husband’s habit of returning bar mitzvah invitations with the words THERE IS NO GOD scrawled on them.
Zoe Heller’s third novel surveys in quite merciless detail an entity that, in the run-up to a presidential election that may actually be won by a liberal, has edged back onto the margins of the public consciousness: the old American left. Joel Litvinoff, Audrey’s other half, is a kind of
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Within hours, the news spread. A grimy gang of desperadoes had been captured just in time to stop them setting out on an assassination plot of shocking audacity.'
@katheder on the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/butchers-knives-treason-and-plot
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete
'Cruickshank’s history reveals an extraordinary eclecticism of architectural styles and buildings, from Dutch Revivalism to Arts and Crafts experimentation, from Georgian terraces to Victorian mansion blocks.'
William Boyd on the architecture of Chelsea.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/where-george-eliot-meets-mick-jagger