Gall in the family

EVERY day in every way, the Rubins are getting better and better. Well, perhaps not quite. But Claudia Rubin, the family’s dazzling, driven matriarch -- first female rabbi of New Belsize Liberal and darling of the British media -- has matters in hand. Her forthcoming mix of memoir and “moral and ethical handbook” should shore up her finances and cement her status as “family goddess, the soul of the nation.”

At 55, Claudia has more fears and responsibilities than she can admit to. Her expenses have too long outpaced her earnings, and the family’s house in North London is crumbling. Her husband, Norman, a biographer, rarely contributes to the coffers, and her two youngest children never do. Another mother might see these soon-to-be-thirtysomethings as the layabouts they are. Claudia, though, knows better: Dreadlocked, spliff-smoking Sim (Simeon) and exquisite, fragile Em (Emily) are doomed to failure in an inferior world.

However, the second-most-successful Rubin -- her 34-year-old barrister son, Leo -- is marrying just the right wife, which should ramp up publicity for her book quite nicely. And though his mother isn’t presiding over the ceremony, she is, as always, stealing the show: “With her in their midst, this brilliant schtuppable pioneer, who could not be happy?” Only the uninvited, of course, particularly the goys outside the synagogue gates.

Unfortunately, some of those within are also less than content. Frances, the fourth sibling, is nervous by nature and not the stylish offspring Claudia wished for -- though she’s a literary agent, her clients aren’t the sort whose names you drop. And the best man is jittery; we soon discover why when Leo leaves his bride-to-be at the chuppah. This is not a case of cold feet. The groom’s true love, it emerges, is “the officiating rabbi’s wife,” Helen Baum.

“When We Were Bad,” Charlotte Mendelson’s immensely funny and affecting third novel, pivots on this bravura opening sequence and then sustains its narrative energy. Over the next two months, through the eyes of Claudia, Norman, Leo and particularly Frances, we watch this sacred monster move into damage-control mode and expect the others to do the same: “They want what she wants. How could they not. They will not let her down again.”

But they continue to do so. Norman is shedding his role as a failure: His exploration of Cedric Vickers (“bard of suspicious, sentimental Middle England,” with more than a touch of John Betjeman about him) contains a biographer’s -- particularly a Jewish biographer’s -- dream bombshell. Yet he’s doing his best to botch things, since he hasn’t managed to tell Claudia he has a book coming out, one that might well upstage hers. And then there’s the question of Selina Fawcett-Lye, a fellow biographer, who hangs on Norman’s every word, even the Yiddish ones.

Frances, fearing herself an indifferent wife and mother (and a worse stepmother), longs for passion and stimulus; for a while, she finds the latter in extended phone calls with a tantalizing androgynous medic who is her sister’s girlfriend. As for Leo, giving up Helen Baum is more painful than he expected: “If he cannot find a way to forget his beloved he will have nothing to look forward to but the energetic efforts of his community: matchmaking at Chanukkah cabarets and vegetarian Seder sing-alongs, eyelash-fluttering over the book of Leviticus, Tuesday night Older Singles Mingles. He might as well be dead.”

“When We Were Bad” is more than a highly patterned English domestic farce. The literary critic Lorna Sage referred to the “festive rhythm” in Iris Murdoch’s writing, and Mendelson’s prose has even more swing and zing. There’s no shortage of wry byplay and observation: Norman debating “which of the Queen’s sons seems most Jewish”; Frances’ young stepdaughters settled on the sofa, “comparing their inner lips”; Frances evading responsibility in the loo, “rolling her forehead on the calcified tiles, lowing softly like a calf, to pull herself together.” The hyperarticulate Rubins, so adept at using language to avoid communicating, are aware of how it can wound. When Claudia admits that she’s known about Norman’s book all along, she adds, “And it’s good for your career. . . . What happens within a marriage is not the issue here.” Norman can’t even respond -- “Never has an indefinite article frightened him more.”

Whether choreographing on a grand scale -- Claudia’s post-wedding-snafu image management includes a Seder extravaganza -- or more intimately, Mendelson has a tenderness for her muddled creations. There’s an amused empathy in her channeling of Claudia’s certitude (by no means as firm as the rabbi would like), of Leo’s hopes that pornography will end his obsession with Helen Baum, or of Norman’s feel-bad reveries on Hampstead Heath as he watches “a particularly windswept cat fancier. . . stamping her way up the slope toward him.” While he ponders the unquotable thing this woman needs, he’s in for a short, sharp shock: “Oh my God. It is his daughter.” And this is only one of the book’s many moments of recognition that flicker between mortification and heartache.

Mendelson also offers a cornucopia of Jewish characters. There are those who go to Claudia’s ‘gogue, as Sim calls it, now that it’s cool; there are the devout; there are the inhabitants of Brent Cross, which is “too suburban-Jewish for the Rubins; they roll their r’s when they speak of it, to show it is a place where others go.” The Rubins define the ideal Jew by what he isn’t: Frances’ admirable husband is “neither a so-called Anglo-Jew with class delusions, nor a glamorous Sephardi, nor, God forbid, a frummer with rude Israeli relatives and sisters in pancake wigs. Like them he believes unthinkingly in a cross but vaguely humorous God.”

It would be easy to categorize “When We Were Bad” as “Jewish fiction” (though considerably more difficult to debate what that entails), but Mendelson has produced something much rarer -- a novel that wittily and searingly explores the relationships between parents and their adult children. Some will compare it to “Disobedience,” Naomi Alderman’s novel of inheritance and expectation, which won the 2006 Orange Prize for New Writers. Though “Disobedience” is also set in north London, its world of Orthodox Jews is more closed than Claudia’s trendy domain. Alderman’s and Mendelson’s novels (along with those of, for instance, Howard Jacobson and the late Bernice Rubens) intrigue because they explore English families who happen to be Jewish. Or is it Jewish families who happen to be English? (Bryan Cheyette, who has written extensively on British-Jewish literature, points out: “As Jewish writers are thought not to exist in Britain, the common reaction to my eccentric enthusiasm has been, until recent years, incredulity.”) Certainly the themes of invisibility and renunciation that ruffle “Disobedience,” and to a lesser extent “When We Were Bad,” wouldn’t be out of place in, say, the 1945 British weepy “Brief Encounter” -- or, for that matter, in much early gay fiction. “So many people do not want her to be successful,” Claudia thinks, “the competitive; the bigoted; the envious; those who insist all English Jews must keep their heads down, in that crouching self-loathing way she cannot stand.”

But “When We Were Bad” isn’t for one minute a plea for understanding -- or, worse, tolerance. It’s too probing, too rammed with sensuous possibility, too gleefully inventive, to be fiction as PR. In “Writing About Jews,” Philip Roth declared: “To confuse a ‘balanced portrayal’ with a novel is finally to be led into absurdities.” Absurdities (of the best sort) -- and even deep variations on clichés; the overpowering Jewish mother, for one -- abound in “When We Were Bad.” And Charlotte Mendelson morphs them into an elegant comedy of longing and survival.

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From ‘When We Were Bad’:

For her eighth birthday, when other girls were begging for guinea pigs or Victorian dollhouses with removable frontage, Frances decided to ask for her father. She requested that he take her on a trip to the British Museum and, despite the many ways this might have hurt the others’ feelings, Norman agreed. The journey involved two buses and St. Pancras station in the snow. He brought provisions: raisins and a sat-upon cheese sandwich, leathery inside its cling-film wrapping, like the meat Attila carried under his saddle.

“We’re Huns,” she said, and he had smiled. Their conversation was a little halting but she had never been happier -- except, of course, for worrying about what to do if he died here, so far from home.