When We Were Bad Book

The story of Claudia, a famous English rabbi and powerful matriarch, the husband living in her shadow, and their four children. Think The Corrections meets Philip Roth. Kind of.

Quite frankly, I wasn't expecting to like this book too much -- the only reason I picked it up was that it was sitting on my office bookshelf and I had forgotten to bring the other book I was reading. As I'm terrified of being caught on public transportation with nothing to read, I grabbed this, mostly because it looked more enticing than "New York Civil Practice Law and Rules," which was the one next to it. I figured it would be one of those weepy, self-indulgent pieces of work with lots of stuff about the frustrations and the beauty of family.

Well, in fairness, it did go on a lot about the frustrations and beauty of family. But it was also well-written without being over-written, with a strong narrative and characters who can be downright unpleasant -- a difficult type of character to write well, but Mendelson has the right touch most of the time. (She's a little less successful writing characters that she clearly doesn't like -- she succumbs too easily to making them into caricatures.) I thought that the ending came a bit close to being a cop-out in one or two respects, but Mendelson stopped just short of really taking the coward's way out. Still, I found it somewhat less than satisfying, somehow -- it just seemed to peter out.

A side note: I find it pretty interesting to read the other reviews of this book, as the overarching theme seems to be 1) I disliked these characters so I couldn't get through the book; and 2) I disliked this book because it used terms I didn't understand, such as "shul." The second comment speaks for itself, so you can draw what conclusions you will; let's just say I never heard similar complaints about, say, books by Rakesh Satyal, which also tend to use non-English words. The first complaint I think is telling because one of the characters is a woman who doesn't like being a mother -- a type of character that seems to drive people completely insane. You can also draw your own conclusions about that, but let's just say I think it says depressing things about how people view women and mothers (and no, those two classes need not always overlap).