Bette To Play An English Character?

Guardian Unlimited
June 1, 2009
Zoe Heller tells Hay audience of casting concerns for film of The Believers
Novelist was told ‘quintessentially English‘ character may be played by US star Bette Midler

Following the successful adaptation of her last novel, Notes on a Scandal, Zoe Heller’s latest book is to be turned into a major Hollywood film, the novelist told an audience at the Hay festival yesterday.

But while Heller had nothing but praise for the performances in Notes on a Scandal, which earned Oscar nominations for stars Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett, she confessed to having some concerns about the casting of The Believers.

“I was talking to the agent about who would play Audrey [one of the book’s central characters] and she said: ‘Zoe, I have words for you. Bette. Midler’.”

Heller, who is British but lives in New York, said she had always considered Audrey as quintessentially English.

“I said, hmm, jolly interesting casting. Gosh, I don’t know. I suppose she is a very versatile actress ”¦”

Audrey, the English-born wife and mother of a dysfunctional leftwing New York family, has been described by some reviewers as “the vilest ever in literature”. She swears continually, shows little compassion for the other characters ”“ even her three children ”“ and is vindictive and cruel.

Heller said she had been surprised by the outpouring of hatred for Audrey, adding that readers could not approach fiction hoping to find characters they like.

“Sue me if it’s not interesting,” she said, “but it’s not my job to make people that you like and want to have tea with.”

She said many critics had misread a central event towards the end of the novel, where Audrey appears to experience some kind of transformation. Her intention was that this would be read as a cynical act, not that Audrey had actually softened. But many critics thought quite the opposite and described the plot as being “soap-operatic”.

“This is the first time for me that there has been quite a drastic difference in my reading of the book and others’,” said Heller. “Of course I pay lip service to not caring about this, say that I just put it out there and it’s for others to interpret, but really I wanted to hold seminars and say ‘no, it’s not really that way’.”

Asked which of her characters were the hardest to say goodbye to and whether any of them would be resurrected in a later book she said: “None of them. And never.”

She described as “such baloney” a suggestion from her interviewer, UCL English professor John Mullen, that novels were more meaningful for readers if the writer felt an intense connection to its characters.

“I worry when I hear other authors talk about the way they write; how so-and-so just came to them and how they cried when the book was finished. I just don’t feel that way about my characters.”

She said that although she does not usually do much research for her novels, she did spend a lot of time learning about Orthodox Judaism, so as not to misrepresent it. “I knew that if I didn’t there would be some rabbi from Long Island who would stand up and say ‘that’s not the way we do it’.”

In fact Heller said she spent so much time studying the Talmud that her husband became concerned. “I would tell him that I was off for another class on the Talmud, and he would say, ‘Oh no, you’re not going to convert are you?’ But that didn’t happen.”