The Elected Member
by Bernice Rubens
Summary
Norman Zweck was a prodigy. He was a barrister at twenty five, the pride of a Jewish family in the East End of London, and he is now forty one, addicted to amphetamines, and confined to the bedroom of his father's house, where he sees silverfish moving across every surface.
The novel opens inside that room and then works outward through the family that produced him. Rabbi Zweck, his father, is old and bewildered and cannot stop feeding him. Bella, his sister, still wears the white ankle socks she was put in as a child and has never left. Esther, the other sister, married outside the faith and was cut off entirely. Each of them has decided the collapse is somebody else's doing.
Rubens is writing about a family that has selected one member to carry its madness, which is where the title comes from, and about the price of being the one chosen for that job.
It is short, claustrophobic and often very funny in a bleak Jewish comic register. The hospital and withdrawal scenes are unsparing. Best for readers who like family novels that decline to distribute blame comfortably, and a natural companion to Philip Roth's early books, though Rubens is colder and less interested in being liked.
At around two hundred and fifty pages it reads quickly, and the Yiddish inflected dialogue of the older generation is one of its real pleasures. A good choice for anyone working through the winners who expects the early years to be dry and would like to be wrong.
Historical Context & Significance
The Elected Member won the Booker Prize in 1970, and Bernice Rubens was the first woman to win it. She remains the only Welsh writer to have done so.
That first is less celebrated than it should be. Rubens published more than twenty novels across four decades and is now among the most forgotten of the early winners, a fate the Booker's own retrospectives have acknowledged and tried to correct.
She was born in Cardiff to a Lithuanian Jewish father and a Polish Jewish mother, worked as a documentary film maker before turning to novels full time. The novel's treatment of addiction and psychiatric confinement was unusually frank for 1970, and the book has aged considerably better than its obscurity suggests.