Praise for "When We Were Bad"
‘Britain is
buzzing with a generation of charismatic young faces who are reshaping
the nation. Here, Bazaar celebrates
the New Establishment - the 40 people under 40 who we feel best represent
what it means to be British today... Some you may ‘Immensely funny and affecting… 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… an
elegant comedy of longing and survival’ ‘Wonderful: witty, poignant, surprising and beautifully written.
I sprinted through its pages and was sorry to close the covers….brilliant…"Jews
behaving badly" is how Mendelson encapsulates her novel in the Guardian,
and this is progress. I find it refreshing to see a Jewish family portrayed
as neither exemplary nor caricaturish. The Rubins are simply themselves’ ‘This exuberantly brilliant novel by one of Britain’s most
exciting writers… British Jewry has finally gotten its own sprawling
Jewish family novel. More delightfully, like the best fiction, it is
universal’ ‘Philip Roth has said that his fiction is
about people in trouble, and trouble is what Mendelson proves so good
at making for her characters. Like Roth in … Portnoy's Complaint, Mendelson succeeds
in creating a family environment that is both appealing and appalling. When
We Were Bad is a funny, smart and delightfully ambivalent novel
about surviving the people who love us most’ ‘The glamourous facade of a distinguished
Jewish clan in London crumbles after a wedding-day disaster in Charlotte
Mendelson's incomparably arch When We Were Bad’ This is a third novel
by Charlotte Mendelson, whose second, Daughters
of Jerusalem, won the Somerset Maugham Award and the John Llewellyn
Rhys Prize. Her novels are perfectly balanced observations of human
nature captured in all its hideous glories, usually in family settings.
As intelligent as it is funny, her writing is brilliant at bringing
out the awkwardness of the transition from family life to independent
adult existence (if, indeed, any of us really achieve it)… Mendelson's
writing is a joy because it is ultra-tight: not one spare word…There
is just the right tension between plot and character here: you care
about how it will all unravel and you relish every moment along the
way. Mendelson has an astonishing eye for detail, for images and sayings
that remain with you long afterwards. She gives her characters seemingly
innocuous secret thoughts full of meaning…This is a beautifully
observed literary comedy as well as a painfully accurate depiction
of one big old family mess. It makes you cringe, laugh and wince in
all the right places. It is not so much about the life of one Jewish
family as it is about the lies we all tell ourselves in order to put
up with our ramshackle home lives’ This is a dazzling portrait
of a family in crisis. Watchful,
alert to details and insightful, it more than meets the challenge of
its opening line: "The Rubin
family, everybody agrees, seems doomed to happiness”’ ‘Charlotte Mendelson’s When We Were Bad will
take its place among classic accounts of tribal misadventure with the
same apparent effortlessness that proves so pleasurable in her writing.
Rarely can readers of contemporary fiction feel themselves to be in
such safe hands. How her editors must have thrilled when presented
with such an impeccable novel. The family in question is the Rubins;
a unit not merely Jewish, but rabbinical, and yet instantly recognisable
to the most goyish reader…This is not a funny novel, but it creates the same feel-good
effect, despite the many miseries it describes. Mendelson is good on
food, fond of a gustatory metaphor, and there is something delectably
satisfying in her writing – an indulgence one can relish without
fear of crass note. Her characters manifest that consummate novelistic
accomplishment: fiction with the air of reportage. Like one’s own
nearest and sometime dearest, the Rubins don’t appear written,
they just are’ ‘Fast-paced and engaging…brilliant…touching and
true’ ‘Intelligent and enjoyable…excellent’ ‘Assured, inventive and entertaining…brilliantly climactic…intelligent
and witty. The Rubin family may be a singular one but the delights
and the difficulties its members have with sex and spirituality, food
and domesticty, expectation and acheivement, will have a universal appeal’ ‘Brilliant…highly entertaining’ ‘Funny and emotionally true, this is a comedy with
the warmest of hearts and the most deliciously subversive of agendas’ ‘I loved this, I really loved this...a sharp, kind,
funny, old-fashioned family story...really, really wonderful’ ‘Enthralling…Written in a present-tense
third person that Mendelson inhabits confidently, the novel has an admirable
stylistic restlessness. She can take risks and get away with it. There
are moments of subtle lyricism, best of all when Frances, hopeless as
a new mother and step-mother, comes, like a frozen statue, slowly, hopefully
back to life… Nothing here is overwritten. This is not a
book about faiths in London or multi-culturalism. Engrossing…emotional
depth and stylistic boldness’ ‘Written with tremendous authority, insight, humour and even wisdom…convincing
and moving…funny, absorbing and certain to linger in the imagination’ ‘Mendelson relishes her task, veering thrillingly close to pathos,
farce and melodramatic emotion, deploying a style that reads like high
gossip at times, but always maintaining poise by lancing the text with
barbs of wit… such grace and immaculate lightness’ ‘With great delicacy and elliptical prose, Mendelson draws a subtle
and compassionate picture of a family as it unravels. A novel about
secrets and the damage they cause… impressive’ ‘Compelling…Gathered for their son Leo’s
wedding, the Rubin family are stunned when Leo makes a bolt for the door,
taking the rabbi’s wife with him. A poignant and compassionate
novel of a family in crisis as one member after another faces some home
truths’ ‘Secret thoughts and unnameable hangups are teased out in glowing,
metaphorical and often very funny prose…Mendelson explores the
shadows and ghosts haunting a fmaily which appears to outsiders to be
a harmonious, messy, intellectual ideal’ ‘Charlotte Mendelson is one of our most exciting young novelists… She
has no peer for dramatizing the tangled web of family relationships and
loyalties, for exploring the perils of intellectualism and self-satisfaction. Her
fiction excels at showing the curious ways by which sexual passion can
take us by surprise… Mendelson has a gift for showing characters
conflicted between their wish to show loyalty to their families, and
their desire to follow their own sexual path… Frances is a typical
Mendelson heroine: sensitive, bookish, rather clumsy, and passionate. The
book traces how she is bowled over, undone and finally liberated by her
own integrity… When We Were Bad is a tale of twists,
in which the careful excellence of Mendelson’s plotting keeps the
reader turning the pages, gripped by the characters’ muddled attempts
to live their lives without hurting each other… The novel that
came to my mind was Jonathan Franzen’s smash hit, The Corrections. Like
Franzen, Mendelson dissects the most complex family issues, and can show
through a few words the painful tensions and histories that can lie under
the most innocuous words. They share a skill for set pieces and
a tender eye for detail… Mendelson and Franzen have a talent for
short, pitch-perfect dialogue, and a skill at showing the workings of
the human mind… When We Were Bad is a bold, brilliant,
beautiful novel and a touching, poignant and often hilarious rollercoaster
ride through sex, secrets and family love. A shoo-in for the Orange
or Booker prize, surely’ ‘Rarely has the suffocating hold of family life been so powerfully
portrayed as it has here… Mendelson’s great achievement
is to make us care…uncompromising and brave’ ‘Quite superlative’ ‘A witty assassination of North London Jewish
matriarchy by an award-winning British novelist....astute, affectionately
mocking prose and a wicked but merciful intelligence’ ‘A completely brilliant book. Breathtakingly
good’ ‘Absolutely spellbinding, so funny, so moving,
so totally believable’ 'Never has the perfect family cracked and crumbled
with such elegance, warmth and humour’
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