When We Were Bad
by Charlotte Mendelson
Picador ₤12.99, 369 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤10.39

Is it only in Jewish families that adult children can still be struggling to break away from their parents into their 30s, 40s and beyond? Perhaps not, but it’s a common pattern among Jews, for whom even marriage and children do not always signal the completion of passage into independent adulthood. This is certainly the case with the Rubins – the family dissected by Charlotte Mendelson in When We Were Bad .

Rabbi Claudia Rubin, who remains glossily beautiful at 55, is not just mother but matriarch and family goddess: community leader, provider of both food and financial support to her four children and a host of others. Her husband, Norman, by contrast, is a failed academic whose books on obscure writers have sunk without trace. Each of the Rubin children has remained attached and dependent on their mother. Simeon and Emily, both in their late twenties, are stuck in adolescence; Simeon is hostile and uncommunicative, ”poor” Emily weepy and melodramatic.

The older children, Frances and Leo, in their mid-thirties, have more of the trappings of adulthood. Frances, a literary agent, is married with a son and two stepdaughters; Leo is a barrister and about to marry. And yet their lives are lived in accordance with their mother’s needs and opinions, their own desires remain unexcavated and unexamined.

It doesn’t last. Leo’s wedding, with which the novel opens, collapses into comic chaos when he bolts from the ceremony with his lover, the married Helen Baum. Norman is planning a book that looks set to be a triumphant success and not one of the convenient failures he keeps on producing, and which have allowed Claudia the limelight.

Frances, who lies at the emotional heart of the book, has a more complex and painful journey to undergo. She has never felt passion for her husband, a health-and-safety obsessive chosen for her by Claudia. She feels herself an incompetent mother, has not bonded with her baby son, and is constantly fearful that she may harm him. Every element of Frances’s life is uncomfortable, ill-fitting. Even if she had the courage to, it is unclear how she ought to change. The slow disintegration of her unhappy life begins when she meets Jay, a woman who dresses as a man, who is confident, assured and humorous, and with whom conversation is effortless and thrilling. It is Jay who inspires Frances to imagine a world not ruled by her mother.

The narrative of the novel is fast-paced and engaging, turning rapidly between four plot strands: Leo’s hilarious struggles with his libido; the progress of Norman’s book; Frances’s groping toward freedom, and Claudia’s attempts to keep the family together.

If there is a weakness, it is that, in the large cast of characters, only a few are fully brought to life. This is perhaps inevitable: Jewish ”geography” - the intricate friendship and kinship network of Jewish communal life - is vast and sprawling. To portray it accurately, friends of friends, cousins, aunts and elderly community buffers must all be included. To bring each one to rounded life would take a novel five times as long as this. So the younger Rubins, Emily and Simeon, remain partly in the shadows, more subject to one-liners than fully realised creations.

Those one-liners, however, are often brilliant. Mendelson skewers the Jewish family’s obsessive relationship with food when Frances asks: ”How’s Dad?”. Emily replies: ”Barely eating. Hardly even meals.” The intensive preparations for a Passover Seder are also described with wince-inducing accuracy, from the endless list-making to the panic which leads Frances to provide a ham bone for the Seder plate.

Frances’s story, too, is touching and true. Her sadness is tinged with humour; she feels herself, in comparison to her siblings, to be ”less succulent than the others, like a disappointing section of tangerine”. There is a core of strength to Frances, and a complexity that feels both genuine and attractive. Frances’s neuroses come to seem a not-unreasonable response to the insanity of her family.

That the matriarch, Claudia, remains a sympathetic character is one of the great triumphs of this book. Rabbi Rubin has kept her family in a half-child, dependent state, but Mendelson does not condemn her or turn her into a grotesque caricature of a grasping Jewish mother. She cannot be less than she is, and simple force of personality has kept her children in thrall to her. In the end it is for them to make the decision to leave, and not for her to let them go.

Naomi Alderman’s “Disobedience” (Penguin) won the 2006 Orange Award for New Writers