When We Were Bad [Hardcover]

Charlotte Mendelson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 13, 2007

Critics in Britain are already raving about Charlotte Mendelson’s excoriatingly funny yet deeply humane novel about a glamorous London family that happens to be falling apart.

The Rubins are the perfect family. They’re wonderfully happy and very glamorous. The mother, Claudia, is the ultimate Jewish matriarch: a powerful rabbi known for her charm, brains, and determination. Now this dynastic Jewish family is getting ready to marry off the perfect eldest son. History, community, and even gastronomy unite the guests lucky enough to attend this joyous occasion.

But when the groom -- one minute before exchanging vows -- bolts with the wrong woman, the myths that have defined this family take on darker overtones. Mendelson’s astonishing eye for detail, as well as her just-right balance of plot and character, makes the unfolding of this story an uncommon treat. In a marvelously compressed style that also bursts with life, she reveals how all four adult Rubin children, and their parents, struggle with huge secrets, sexual frustration and sexual experimentation, and many betrayals.

Charlotte Mendelson opens a window on a realm rarely explored in British society: the complicated world of English Jewry. But to watch this seemingly blessed family drastically, disastrously fall apart before regaining balance is to understand that their struggles -- like all of ours -- are universal ones.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With humor and panache, British writer Mendelson (Love in Idleness) presents London's Rubin clan, presided over by matriarch Claudia, a brilliant, charismatic London rabbi blessed with zaftig curves and a will of steel. Claudia seems to have molded nebbishy husband Norman and their four children into the perfect family. But as the plodding eldest, Leo, leaves the altar to run off with his mistress, the fault lines are exposed: next-eldest Frances eventually admits to her despair about her dutiful marriage and her lack of maternal feeling, and even colorless Norman turns out to have a guilty secret. Claudia, however, must preserve the myth of a perfect family because it's the basis of her about-to-be published memoir, a moral and ethical handbook for families of the new millennium. What makes Mendelson's novel especially naughty are her candid observations about the crouching, self-loathing way that many English Jews try to fit into Anglo society while simultaneously maintaining their traditions: Claudia's seder, for example, is a comic set piece of frantic preparation and grim hospitality. But while the social satire is deft, the action upon which Mendelson hangs it veers into farce. And with the introduction of imminent tragedy, the plot abruptly crashes. (Aug.)
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From Booklist

To all appearances, the fabled life of the Rubin family of London—with beautiful, brainy, and accomplished 55-year-old rabbi Claudia Rubin at the helm—is nothing but happy, until firstborn Leo abandons his bride at his wedding to run off with the wife of the officiating rabbi. But there are earlier cracks in this facade: younger children Simeon and Emily, approaching 30, still live at home, unable to make their way in the world; older sister Frances, to whom her siblings turn for help, is desperately unhappy in a virtually arranged marriage to a widower with two young daughters and is unable to love her infant son; and Claudia's husband, Norman, the appropriately less-successful spouse, can't tell his wife about the book he has written and sold. Mendelson, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for her second novel, Daughters of Jerusalem (2004), is a keen observer of family life and of English Jewry, as experienced from within and seen from without, and she deftly blends humor and pathos in this portrayal of a family in crisis. Leber, Michele

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (August 13, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618883436
• ISBN-13: 978-0618883431
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #648,635 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Dysfunctional, enmeshed family headed by narcissistic matriarch, May 30, 2008

By 

Marron (Boston) - See all my reviews

This review is from: When We Were Bad (Hardcover)

SPOILER ALERT

This book is well written, and at times amusing, but quite exasperating in its depiction of the Rubin family. I disliked half the characters, and the least likable ones were so broadly drawn as to be unbelievable (e.g., a 27 year old woman in so many words telling her brother, who wants to live with his lover, "How could you? We all have to sacrifice our lives for mum's sake!"). As a therapist I found the level of family dysfunction and enmeshment not very funny at all. Was it supposed to be endearing, despite its quirks? Well, it wasn't!

Three stars for readability, and for giving us two characters who escaped (more or less).

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars When We Were Bad, November 11, 2007

By 

Book Bag (Newfoundland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: When We Were Bad (Hardcover)

Have just finished reading When We Were Bad and found the story very entertaining and humorous. Great depiction of a family who appears to be "the perfect family" to outsiders, but when we see the family from the inside, is just as dysfunctional as many of us. Very clever writing.

Would recommend this book - definitely.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not easy to characterize, December 31, 2007

By 

algo41 "algo41" (philadelphia, pa United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: When We Were Bad (Hardcover)

This book is not easy to characterize, and that is one of its strong points. It is the story of a dominating woman, her children and her husband who have all suffered from this domination, but it is also what I call a feel good story, thanks to its outcomes; it is also a social satire and even a comedy. Francis at one point is behaving strangely, but she is only dimly aware of this, "no more than of the thick gray dust crushed beneath the wheels (of the train), the gray mice trembling against the track as the train races past into darkness". Mendelsohn is not a particularly good prose stylist, but the quoted material is from an author who sometimes expects her readers to laugh with her at her characters and their weaknesses and situations.

The dominating woman is a Rabbi, and her professional life certainly adds interest to the story, though theology plays no real role. I think Mendelsohn goes a little overboard with the 2 younger children, and I think an editor could have eliminated Simeon with good effect.