This 1970 Booker winner opens with the following quote:

“If patients are disturbed, their families are often very disturbing.”

This really tells you all you need to know about this novel. The central character, Norman Zweck, is mentally ill, and his illness can be traced directly back to his profoundly dysfunctional family.

Norman comes from a traditional Jewish family. His father came to London from Lithuania with just a suitcase and a name and address written on a scrap of paper. Despite being forty Norman lives at home (and indeed has never left) with the ghost of his controlling mother and his weak-willed father. His older sister, Bella, still lives at home as well and wears ankle socks every day as a vivid reminder of her frozen adolescence. Younger sister Laura left home and married outside their religion, and has therefore been expelled from the family circle – mention of her name is forbidden.

The primary symptom of Norman’s mental illness is that he sees silverfish crawling everywhere. It’s a horribly and vividly realised psychosis, and it cripples him, leaving him unable to leave his bedroom, work, or sustain a relationship.

We slowly learn the details of the family history through the reminiscences of the characters as they react to Norman’s most recent breakdown. He is addicted to amphetamines, although the precise cocktail of drugs and childhood trauma that leads to his illness is not ever entirely resolved. However his family are unable to cope, so on the advice of the family doctor they have him committed to a psychiatric hospital for treatment. Here he quickly finds someone ready to sell him more amphetamines, meaning any treatment is unlikely to work. Back home his family suffers feelings of guilt that they have not been able to help him. Bella, we eventually find out, had an incestuous relationship with her brother. Laura ran away from a relationship with Norman’s best friend, David, who we are given to understand (without it ever being made explicit) was his lover. Thoughts of and actual suicides haunt the novel, giving it a structure in which we come to see that the mental institution Norman is committed to is very similar to the home he was unable to leave.

The novel’s title is puzzling. One of Norman’s fellow inmates in the hospital has delusions he is in the Cabinet, although he is always referred to as Minister rather than the elected member, or any variation thereof, and in any event is a relatively peripheral character upon which to name the novel. The title could refer to Norman being the chosen one, the golden boy on whom the hopes of his family came to rest – he was gifted with languages, and qualified as a barrister – although the ‘member’ element of the title still escapes me.

Bernice Rubens had a long writing career, and most of her many novels remain in print, so there must be an audience for them somewhere. But whilst I found The Elected Member a largely inoffensive read, it left me with no appetite for following up with anything else by this author.