By Zoe Heller
For all intents and purposes, Audrey Howard wanted a way out of her seemingly dreary and lonely life. When she met American Joel Litvinoff, they hit it off in an uncomfortable and awkward way. Audrey doesn’t think twice about it when Joel, wanting to shock and take some of the power back in their union, suggests that he marry her and take her away with him to the US.
40 years later, Audrey Litvinoff, wife of well known and unpopular attorney, Joel Litvinoff, mother of 3 grown children, remains an unlikeable character. She is mean, self-absorbed, disrespectful and downright rude. By her own admission she feels no particular maternal feelings to either of her daughters, who are going through difficult times. Any love that Audrey has is toward her adopted son, who is hopelessly and desperately addicted to drugs; A habit that, she is blindly supporting. It could be argued that these awful characteristics of Audrey’s stem from deep-seated insecurities, as is usually the case. True or not, Audrey makes it very difficult to see any good in her. To her credit, she couldn’t give a toss.
When Joel collapses at the start of a court session, and goes into a coma, secrets from his past emerge. Audrey and her little family are forced to come to terms with it, and I found myself backing Audrey to “win” as it were. She doesn’t change in any way. Faced with her husband’s mortality, she doesn’t become any less pig headed but she had my full support.
It is for this reason I enjoy reading Zoe Heller’s work. The characters can be terrible and do silly and stupid things and you might hate them with all your being. Then something changes, and whilst no deed has been undone, she quietly changes the readers’ mind, without us noticing it and you get to the end, ever so slightly puzzled and think, “That was clever, how did she do that?”