Reading Notes: Inconvenience
In Zoë Heller’s new novel, The Believers, one of the characters, Rosa Litvinoff, walks into a synagogue out of pure curiosity but walks out engaged by her ancestral faith, even though it takes her a while to recognize this fact.
Something had happened to her, something she could not ignore or deny. And there was a sense in which its unlikelihood, its horrible inconvenience, was precisely what made it so compelling.
Compelled by horrible inconvenience — this must be an update of quia absurdum est. To be drawn to something by a negative — a lack, a loss, a flaw, a defect— is incomprehensible to me. My mind scurries to transform the bad thing into a good thing. Rosa, for example, likes annoying her family; it’s a way of maintaining her integrity in a family of leftists while at the same time keeping the faith. She has recently lost her faith in socialism, however, so there’s plenty of room for something that will really annoy her determinedly unobservant parents: Orthodoxy. (Her mother, the inconveniently lovable Audrey, refers to Rosa’s newfound religiousness under the fantastically ugly adjectival rubric, “Jewy.”) So I have no trouble believing that Rosa is drawn to the synagogue by something very positive — which she only perversely labels “inconvenience.”
(One thinks not only of the mid-century Jews for whom religion was not optional, and a great deal worse than inconvenient; but one also remembers the early Christian martyrs, to whom the sedition of proscribed faith provided a fast track to glory. To speak of an inconvenient religion is to conjure Lady Bracknell.)
Intellectually, I oblige myself to presume my own imaginative limitation: it is circular to insist that the mere act of wanting something makes that something good, in however unlikely a way. I can’t go there, though. I want only good things — which I only wish made me a good person.