Breaking the ties that bind

05.02.07
Benedicte Page

Charlotte Mendelson's third novel, When We Were Bad (Picador, May), opens with Leo, elder son of charismatic female rabbi and media personality Claudia Rubin, walking out on his wedding, in a crowded synagogue, surrounded by the faithful. He has come to the apocalyptic realisation that he is deeply in love--not with his bride, who is walking up the aisle at that moment, but with Helen, the wife of the rabbi who is about to conduct the service, with whom he has been having a secret affair.

It is, explains the effervescent Mendelson, associate publisher at Headline Review, a moment of the kind that draws her to fiction.

"I love writing about families in crisis, and the thing I particularly like is secret love and secret hatred," she explains energetically, shaking her long hair. "I'm convinced we've all got buried emotions and passions--we despise the person who's supposed to be our best friend; we want to stab our boss, or marry our boss. I'm interested in the way all this is seething under the surface of the most calm-looking person."

In her second novel, Daughters of Jerusalem, which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award, Mendelson drew on her own upbringing as the self-professed "bluestocking" daughter of an Oxford academic to write a story about a family breakdown in the university town. In When We Were Bad, which like the previous novel is spiced with the comedy of human foibles, she draws on another aspect of her background: her Jewish heritage. Rabbi Claudia Rubin and the family she presides over in a rather imperious fashion are, of course, pillars of their Jewish community, and much of the novel takes place during the lead-up to a big Passover celebration.

In fact, Mendelson's own family were atheists, as is she--"I've virtually never been to a synagogue in my life"--but her Jewish cultural identity has always been a distinctive element of her background, she explains. "My family was always different from the families of my friends. They are so much noisier, so much more screaming or laughing or crying. There's an emphasis on food and on family, and one of the things I wanted to write about was how that's a wonderful thing, and how that's an incredibly claustrophobic and inhibiting thing."

Leo is not the only one of Rabbi Claudia's adult children to feel the pressure of conforming to their mother's expectations, as their own emotions draw them elsewhere. Elder daughter Frances, married to Jonathan--a worthy but excruciating husband who takes the art of dullness to new heights--is also on the brink of despair, as she struggles to cope with an apparent inability to be any kind of decent mother to her young son or stepmother to Jonathan's daughters. Then she starts to feel a strange attraction to another woman, and as Claudia organises a splendid Passover feast, which will double as a publicity event for her own forthcoming book, Frances reaches a moment of crisis.

"I wanted to ramp up the pressure in this book," Mendelson explains. "I thought: 'If you're a rabbi's family, it's not just about scandalising your own family and the neighbours, it's the whole community.' You are on a pedestal with everyone looking at you. It's about increasing the pressure on your characters to behave as badly as possible."

Changing the script

"I'm very good at coming up with titles for my authors' books, but I couldn't come up with one for this book. One of the things I had a fantasy about calling it--but which I couldn't possibly have called it--was '50 Ways to Leave Your Mother'.Because for me this book is about the pivotal moment where you either stay embedded in your family of origin, or you make the choices which will upset them but give you a life for yourself.

"I think in all families we have roles: you're the good one, you're the difficult one, you're the one who will never achieve, you're the one who will achieve so much that none of it really counts. The Rubins are all struggling with what it is that other people have decided they are like. Their family has completely written the script, and actually they are saying: 'I don't want to be this person.'"

Editing at Headline Review while writing her own fiction does pile on the pressure, Mendelson acknowledges. It's not just because of the time constraints--she wrote her first book, Love in Idleness, "literally in my lunchbreaks", but now works at Headline just four days a week.

"It makes me a much kinder editor because I understand the ego-ravaged life of the author much more. On the other hand, it makes me more nervous because I am so aware of all the things that can go wrong. On the other hand, it makes me more nervous because I am so aware of all the things that can go wrong. Also, you must have a certain level of 'drivenness' to be an author, and therefore you are very sensitive to criticism. As a publisher, you think: 'Will all my colleagues laugh? Will this novel even get published?' To write with any kind of confidence and momentum and happiness you need to forget that the outside world exists--and I can hear it yelling in my head, talking about 13-digit ISBNs."

There is, though, a definite crossover in her tastes, in terms of what she commissions and what she writes."I really believe in drama through emotion. I was at an event with Tracy Chevalier and Will Sutcliffe, and someone was asking what people's influences were. They were all saying Roth and Bellow and Updike--but I said Dickens and soap operas. I believe in getting people turning to the next chapter--that's my great thing."She divides her authors at Headline into three types: "'Juicy historical'--Emma Darwin and Jude Morgan.

They both write brainy, sexy, romantic, sad; everything you could possibly want in a novel. 'Dark/sexy/funny'--David Schickler or Marcy Dermansky [author of Twins]. And then 'Honest, emotional family stuff'; the queen for me is Elinor Lipman. She's sharp but warm; not saccharine, not bitchy. I'm really picky, I hardly buy anything. I only buy someone if I believe they're the best.

"One of Mendelson's roles as associate publisher is to communicate to the outside world the direction Headline Review is taking, and it is easy to see why she was chosen for the role. She fizzes with enthusiasm as she explains: "I feel really passionately that where we are going with Headline Review is the right way."

Basically, I believe that the average intelligent person, when they go on holiday, will read a mixture: they might have Ian McEwan, Penny Vincenzi and Emma Darwin. What we've said is: 'Let's properly mix commercial and literary together; let's be properly in the middle.' What I like reading is a book that makes me forget that I'm on the Tube--it's not any particular kind of book."