When We Were Bad: A Review

Claudia Rubin can sweep through a room and leave everyone enthralled with devotion. Claudia Rubin is a rabbi, a celebrity, a matriarch all rolled up into one glorious, sumptuous star of a person who seems ‘edible, a fertility symbol made of praline’. As When We Were Bad ends, Claudia Rubin is sitting down to write her family the ‘love letters they deserve’.

The letters may be the start of a new beginning, a new era for the Rubins family, but for now they are the final chapter in the saga of a family falling apart, a family shattering in all directions as each member unleashes their own dirty secret, each one a bomb that zooms to the very core of the family.

There's Leo the porn buying eldest son who runs off with a rabbi's wife and Frances the dependable one who secretly grapples in search of the love she should feel for her son, her husband, her step-daughters, the love that is alarmingly absent. There are the younger siblings who exist in a supported state of perpetual youth and of course their father, Norman, the retiring husband who has done anything but retire, squirrelling himself away instead to write the acclaimed book his wife has been dreaming of for herself.

They inhabit a world of contradiction where family is everything yet nothing, where siblings and parents frantically call each other for hourly updates yet remain entirely oblivious to what is really going on right under their noses, where the reliable become the unreliable and where the preoccupation with food and its plentiful abundance underlines the near absence of soul food, of genuine understanding and spiritual nourishment. That this family exists under the watchful gaze of Rabbi Claudia Rubin, famous for her spiritual nourishment of strangers, is all the more ironic.

To the naked eye the Rubins seem ‘doomed to happiness’ yet ultimately, it seems, they are just doomed. As Claudia clings desperately to her looks, her position, her longed for book publication, all around her are ensconced in their own little bubbles, and all of them are floating further and further away from the mothership. Apparently, Charlotte Mendelson wanted to call this book ’50 ways to leave your mother’ and you can see why. The entire family are trying to escape Claudia's stifling aura in a Freudian orgy of sex and affairs, of gender confusion and whispers of death.

The plot is ferociously fast matched only by Mendelson’s command of language and her ability to draw such engaging characters. On one level the novel works as a light-hearted, comic take on London’s liberal Jewish community. On another it is a dark and emotive psychological comment on the dysfunctional family, of transcending one’s roots... of potentially blowing those roots to bits.

I was captivated by the Jewishness, the ceremonies and tradition. I was impressed by tackling of taboos, most frequently those concerning mother love, or rather lack of it. I was swept along by the quick witted humour. In short I fell for this novel in the way those in the book fall for Claudia Rubin. Hook, line and sinker.




When We Were Bad was short-listed for 2008 Orange Prize for Fiction. Further reviews and a Q&A with the author can be found here.