Sarah Gold

Charlotte Mendelson's "Happy" Family
June 12, 2007

“The Rubin family, everybody agrees, seems doomed to happiness.” Thus begins Charlotte Mendelson’s forthcoming novel, When We Were Bad (Houghton Mifflin, Aug.). “Doomed” is the operative word, and it inevitably brings to mind Tolstoy’s famous opening sentence about happy, and unhappy, families. But in this wicked tale, Mendelson (Love in Idleness) gives us family unhappiness not as tragedy but as farce.

Mendelson has been selected by Waterstone’s as one of the “25 authors for the future” (compiled by polling British publishing insiders) and When We Were Bad—a British-Jewish-family comedy of manners—displays her sharp wit and sure grasp of human foibles, the conflicting demands of fam ily loyalty and independence, the conjoining of love and revenge.

Claudia Rubin is London’s flamboyantly sexy celebrity rabbi, whose apparently happy family undergoes a very public nuclear meltdown just as her new book, a celebratiion of family, is about to be published.

Claudia, her husband and four adult children are comic but never caricatures: self-delusion, denial, alienation and emotional blackmail roil beneath the gleaming Rubin surface, leading to the long-overdue rebellion of the two eldest children and of Claudia’s long-overshadowedspouse, Norman.

But it’s not the only stereotype of the loving Jewish family that comes in for a skewering. Publishing takes its slings from book editor Mendelson, as does polite British anti-Semitism. When a crowd of well-dressed family and friends gather in front of Claudia’s synagogue before her son Leo’s wedding, Mendelson shifts her lens momentarily to passers-by, who “notice details: the clip on a skullcap glinting in the sun; the discreet brass sign beside the gates. They start to look more carefully at the hair, the faces. And, as they move on, one thought unites them: ‘Bloody Jews.’ ”

And When We Were Bad is a bloody good read.

Posted by Sarah Gold on June 12, 2007 | Comments (3)