The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens

Tolstoy pointed out that all happy families are alike, but all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. Ultimately, there are going to be far more novels written about unhappy families than happy ones. Hey, nobody ever said that serious literature had to provide light entertainment.

The Zweck family in The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens is pretty miserable. The late matriarch of the family, Sarah, has been dead for years, but the mourning has never really stopped. Daughter Bella has grown old taking care for her family and has lost any chance of marriage she might have had. Youngest daughter Esther was disinherited for marrying a gentile. The father, Rabbi Zweck, finds himself unable to communicate with his children. And oldest son Norman is a drug-addled, mentally unstable failed former child prodigy, still living in his boyhood bedroom at age forty-one.

We first meet Norman in bed--a bed he inherited from his mother. At night he sees masses of silverfish crawling along the floors, turning his room into a filthy mess. That the silverfish are only a hallucination brought on by the massive doses of amphetamines he takes is a fact he refuses to admit.

His father and sister Bella are near the breaking point for taking care of this brittle man for so long, and make the decision, soon regretted, to have him committed.

While in the hospital, he is cleaned of the drugs--but finds a source on the inside, and soon is seeing silverfish around his bed there. During his stay in the hospital, there are many flashbacks to the lives of the family in earlier years, providing snapshots on how they became the way they are.

Bella and his father try many ineffectual ways to assuage their guilt for having institutionalized Norman, but essentially all of them end in failure, sometimes humiliatingly so: worst of all being the Rabbi's ill-considered attempt to confront who he thinks was the source who sold Norman the pills.

Finally, the family tries to use the crisis to bring them together--and for awhile, it appears as though it is working. In the end, however, nothing is resolved, and the family is broken utterly to a degree no reconciliation will ever fix.

Would it be shallow to dislike a work of literature merely because it has miserable characters, painful themes, an unhappy ending, and so on? Perhaps. Still, I don't think I'm being shallow in my dislike of The Elected Member. It's not that the characters are miserable as much as they revel in misery: they specialize in it.

Characters are deliberately non-communicative: they say something generic, think to themselves of the ugly truth they would prefer not to say, and congratulate themselves for not saying anything of importance. Meanwhile, the opposite party always knows what was meant anyway--speech in this novel becomes a pointless and annoying game of charades.

Gradually, the novel draws a portrait of the dead mother, and an unpleasant portrait it is: dishonest, self-centered, lacking in sympathy, lacking in humanity. It starts to become difficult to believe that this character could have been so important to so many people: she sounds monstrous.

But there is more than enough monstrousness to go around: an aunt who is a nurse is described as cheerfully enjoying the pain of others (unsubtly, she is named "Sadie"). It is implied she takes sexual advantage of patients in her care. There are doctors who can't be bothered to show up at the hospital where they work. And Norman himself, who manipulates his family, may have deliberately led a man to suicide, and, it is strongly implied, may have been engaging in incest.

But it's not unlikable characters and revolting behavior that makes this book a failure: it's that it all seems a formless mass. There's nothing compelling here. Misery does not ennoble characters nor literature. Art does, and there was not enough here.

If you want a portrait of a hellish mental hospital, forget this book, and read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest instead. And as authentic a portrait of London Jewish life this might be (the author was from a Russian Jewish family), the Yiddish is laid on a bit too thick. Ultimately, all the characters seem to be talking in comedy accents--though perhaps that's more my fault for being a fan of borscht belt comedians. However, how can one expect to write deathless prose for a character who speaks like a refugee from a Woody Allen film?

Next up, the "Lost" Booker Prize. Troubles, by J. G. Farrell.