Charlotte Mendelson: amazing risk-taker

Sometimes it’s good to be bad

When We Were Bad. By Charlotte Mendelson. Picador. £12.99 order this book

THE main character of all three of Charlotte Mendelson’s novels is a woman who has to make an act of deliberate sexual choice in order to lead a life she can call her own.
Centre-stage of her latest, When We Were Bad, is 55-year-old Rabbi Claudia Rubin, “camel-skinned, narrow-eyed, with a brain women envy and an opulent, f***able body which makes men weak”.
Trapped in her all- embracing orbit are two of her children: Leo, who does a spectacular bolt seconds before he is about to marry Naomi, the wife of the officiating rabbi in first chapter, having fallen head-over-heels for Helen Baum; and the ungrounded Frances, who is married to Jonathan – such a politically correct husband that he fails to exist as a man in his own right at all.
Leo and Frances’s bids to lead lives they can call their own coincide with Claudia’s best efforts to manipulate the media in order to promote her new book. The entire Rubin family’s financial fortunes depend on her efforts.
Unbeknown to her at first, her husband, Norman, is also about to have his breakthrough book published. By the end, she is able to confront her own and her large extended family’s mortality more compassionately than she has ever been able to do before.
Claudia’s two impossibly stay-at-home children, Simeon and Emily, are likely to steal the show in any television serialisation. Si is “thick-lashed as a baby, his dark dreadlocks tied in a topknot for the occasion like a bandit prince pretending to be tame”. Em is “shining haired as a French king’s mistress”.
Both are so rigidly rooted to the Rubin household in Gospel Oak that it never occurs to them to ever get a job. That would mean confronting the reality of the world as it is, as opposed to fantasising incessantly about how they would like it to be.
Charlotte has undergone a Taj Mahal-sized sea change since entering into a much-publicised relationship with Joanna Briscoe, journalist and author of Sleep With Me. For sheer readability, she now owes more to the likes of Joanna Trollope and Catherine Cookson then her previous perfectionist literary mentors. Along with Jonathan Coe, she is one of the most amazing and risk-taking novelists in their thirties or forties writing today. She can be relied upon for this gorgeous summer page turner.