INTERVIEW: Zoë Heller is a charming, witty, smart conversationalist who has just written a book that fits the same description - her first set in the US, her adopted home
WHAT WON'T BE apparent to those who usually only meet novelist Zoë Heller in print is the fact that she is an expert mimic. Within the space of an hour sitting in the garden of Dublin's Merrion Hotel, she has taken off a Caribbean busybody to a tee, as well as an upper-class English snob aghast at the fact that Heller's children have American accents, and even, for a moment, James Joyce. "I'm being so boring you can't imagine," she tells her publicist, who arrives to pass on a message, but nothing could be further from the truth. Heller in person, munching buttery toast, smoking several cigarettes, gesticulating wildly and flirting with hotel staff, is utterly charming, a witty, smart conversationalist who has just written a book that fits the same description.
This latter is the reason she's in Dublin, her new novel, The Believers, having recently hit Irish bookshops. "I'm perplexed," she says of the response to this, her third book. "People are saying 'This is her American novel'. It didn't occur to me that way." Though all but one of its dysfunctional family of characters are American, and most of its action takes place in New York, London-born Heller says she never set out to write a novel about the country she made her home over 15 years ago, yet she is aware of the risk she was taking in setting her work in the US.
"I don't feel like I'm putting on a funny hat when I'm writing American dialogue," she says. "But of course it does occur to you 'Maybe I'm actually kidding myself'. And though I exist in this culture, I am not of it, and there are some things I will never get quite right."
It's hard to see Heller getting it wrong. Married to an American, with whom she has two American children, she even has momentary, involuntary slips into Americanese - "I'm so pissed I'm not there for that," she says of debates between US presidential hopefuls Obama and McCain - yet her accent is still unmistakably English.
"In writing it's particularly fraught because the tools of my trade are words, and here I am, an English person writing a book set in America . . . and I don't know whether to say pavement or kerb."
Living in the US has provided Heller with a particular perspective on the prejudices that prevail in her mother country, especially towards her adopted one. "I'm the first in line to say that we've just been through eight years of the most grotesque administration in American history and there are all sorts of trends in American politics and history that I don't like, but when Thatcher was ruling Britain did we really think of ourselves as a grotesque bunch of Thatcherites?"
To further complicate matters, Heller and family are currently living on a five-kilometre-long island in the Caribbean. For a woman who had lived all her life in London and New York, this relocation meant a considerable change of pace. "Very late in life I've discovered I really like - it's not even small-town life, it's villagelife," says Heller. "I love island life."
IT'S EASY TO see why, as she conjures up the idyllic setting in which she and her screenwriting husband, Larry Konner, have chosen to base themselves. "The place I have to work out there is outside on the deck. I look out over the sea and there are palm trees. It's unbelievably gorgeous." It's a vastly different professional environment to the one she had in New York. "I work in a real shithole at home, it's an old men's room, an old toilet." Yet being around too much beauty is not necessarily the best recipe for productivity. "It's not helpful to me to be in a beautiful setting, with the wind in the trees and all," she says and laughs. "As a physical setting, it's much better not to have anything nice to look at, I find."
This image of a sarong-clad Heller walking daily along the beach to drop her two children off at the local school and return to write novels under palm trees and sunshine is in marked contrast to the single city-dweller bouncing between parties and analyst sessions who first grabbed our attention in her columns in the Independent on Sundayand the Sunday Times. Heller has clearly moved on from her column, but finds it hard to convince everyone else to do so. "It's probably going to haunt me for the rest of my life," she says, adding that interviewers appear to recall the columns in greater detail than she often can herself. "Really it's like having spent your life drunk. I've written so much crap about myself."
Where the note of regret sounds the loudest is in Heller's acknowledgement that the confessional approach she adopted back then is still influencing interpretations of her literary output now. "I spent large chunks of my working life writing more candidly than I probably should have done about my work and my private life and my mum, and the temptation to read my fiction now biographically must be overwhelming," she admits, while making it clear how little of what we read of the dysfunctional family in The Believershas been mined from her own.
So does she regret writing a column? "From a sisterly point of view, I often feel like saying to young women I see doing a similar thing, 'Think carefully, and possibly don't do it and certainly don't do it for as long as I did', because I just went on too long," she says. "What that meant was that when I tried to do something else, everyone behaved as if I was Gypsy Rose Lee trying to paint a Matisse."
When she left the column to write her first book, Everything You Know, critics were not all kind. Though it was difficult to take at the time, Heller, now 43, has become stoical about their reactions. Everything You Knowwasn't as bad as they said it was, and by the same token, Notes On a Scandalwasn't as good as some people said it was," she says. The latter went on to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, though The Believersfailed to make even the longlist this year. So how important is such an accolade to a writer? "Almost every writer I know knows in their sane mind, knows intellectually, that is what Julian Barnes called posh bingo, that it's not really a test of who's the best writer that year or who's produced the best book," says Heller. "And yet I don't know anyone who doesn't really, really care."
THOUGH HER BOOK didn't win the Booker, Notes On A Scandaldid get the big-screen treatment in a film of the same name directed by Richard Eyre and starring Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench. With the film rights to The Believers already snapped up, Heller appears to have no compunction about allowing her stories to take on new forms.
"I disapprove of authors who take the money and then say 'Oh they treated my poor child so badly. They traduced my deathless prose!'" she says, taking on the tone of an aggrieved novelist. "That's being a bad sport. You take the money and you understand that of course they're going to change it, it's not going to be just an illustrated version of your work." There is, she admits, a caveat. "That's theoretically, but then it is a very confusing thing when it happens . . . it's complicated, but ideally the dignified thing to do is to enjoy the fact that you've been financed to write your next book."
The next is already "simmering in there", says Heller, who says she finds marriage and motherhood has "freed up a lot of the emotional psychic energy that I was spending on wondering 'Ooh, who's going to be my boyfriend? Do I love him? What's going to become of me?" While she acknowledges the difficulties in juggling the day-to-day demands of her career and domestic life, she's certainly not going to complain.
"It would be very unseemly for someone like me to bellyache about the difficulties I have finding the time to write and look after my kids," says Heller. After all, she's a successful novelist who lives on an island in the Caribbean with her husband and children. "I'm one of the most fortunate people in the world." One of the things that makes Heller so likeable is that she admits it.
The Believersby Zoë Heller is published by Fig Tree/Penguin Books, £16.99