Having just finished reading Zoë Heller’s acerbic new novel The Believers, it is perhaps understandable that I am anxious about our interview. There is a reason many reviews of the British-born American novelist’s latest include terms like “misanthropic,” “merciless” and “sadistic.” Frankly, I fear what would happen if this keen dissector of human foibles were to apply her cutting wit to my shabby persona. Tears, probably.

Fortunately, it doesn’t come to that. When the author arrives to meet me at a local coffee shop, she is all smiles and good cheer. When I confess to her my trepidation, she rolls her eyes and sighs. This is not the first she’s heard of it.

“People tend to say, ‘Oh, you have a very bleak view of humanity,’ or ‘You don’t like women, do you?’ or they might say I’m a misanthrope,” says Heller, amused by the characterization. “I always argue: ‘No, no, no, some of my best friends are humans. I love my fellow humans and it’s an expression of that affection that I can acknowledge all the awful things that humans do and still feel they’re worthwhile people.’”

This disconnect between the author’s intention and the audience’s perception is probably attributable to the complexity of her approach. The Believer tells the story of a family unravelling as the articles of their faith (be them religious, political or emotional) are severely tested. The novel is more ambitious in scope than her Booker-nominated Notes on a Scandal, weaving several points of view and plot lines around an extended examination of belief and family.

When 18-year-old Audrey Howard marries Joel Litvinoff, an activist lawyer 14 years her senior, she is uprooted from London to New York and thrown into a new role supporting her prominent husband. As years go by, their children Rosa, Karla and Lenny splinter from the family tree, damaged by the heady brew of neglect, criticism and smothering doled out by their mommy dearest. Rosa turns first to Communism, then to Orthodox Judaism; Karla turns to her loveless marriage with a union organizer; Lenny turns to drugs. Joel’s untimely stroke and plunge into a coma draws them back together, and a revelation about his infidelity forces them to re-examine their fundamental tenets.

“I chose to write about Jews and about the radical left-wing community because those are the cultures of belief with which I am most familiar,” Heller admits. “The big challenge for me was to write sympathetically and non-patronizingly about religion — that was definitely a kind of ambition for the novel.”

Her portrayal of Rosa’s movement from one theory of everything to another is subtle and nuanced. Despite being a self-professed non-believer, Heller is able to tease out the similarities between strongly held political convictions and strongly held religious convictions in surprising ways.

“I think if you are a committed believer of either sort, you tend to develop a kind of system of defenses for warding off information or intelligence that threatens to contradict your articles of faith,” she says. “And that tends to create the situation where instead of trying to deal with complicated political dilemmas, you seek out the party line and keep on repeating it.”

This is particularly true for Audrey who, at the end of the book, finds herself devoted to a lie she no longer believes in, but cannot abandon. “Like a Catholic priest who decides he no longer believes in God, but can’t give up the institution of the church, she understands that her life has been a bit of a lie and decides to kind of uphold the mythology,” Heller says. “She doesn’t know what else to do.”