A deeply sympathetic and acutely realistic study of mental illness, The Elected Member won the Booker Prize in 1970, the second year the prize was awarded. The story unfolds through the point of view of a third-person omniscient narrator, allowing readers to examine the behavior of the characters and to listen to their conversations while also gaining access to the secrets they hide—and hide from—in their thoughts.
The novel presents the story of Rabbi Zweck’s sad family. His son, Norman, is immersed in a delusional state and addicted to amphetamines; daughter Bella, still living at home, is a spinster with an ugly secret staining her life, and daughter Esther has been shunned for marrying outside the faith. Norman was formerly the family’s golden boy, but now his addiction and his madness are torturing his family. He spends most of his time in the bed his mother Sarah died in, remembering her possessive grip on him and watching in delusional horror as imaginary silverfish swarm over him.
The plot is set in motion when Rabbi Zweck reluctantly commits Norman to a mental hospital. Norman is enraged by this betrayal and must be forcibly removed by uniformed officers. Rabbi Zweck is anxious to believe that things will soon return to normal. But the family is trapped in a mimetic repetition: Norman has been cleaned up from his addiction before, but he has always reverted to his old habits. The future does not look bright.
In contrast, the past is a rosy and comforting place, at least for Rabbi Zweck. He does not know the secrets harbored by Bella, nor the truth behind Esther’s marriage and impending divorce, nor Norman’s contribution to both these tragedies. He does remember Sarah’s hysterics whenever Norman would try to assert his independence from the family: she drained his will and kept him rooted to the family in frustration.
Rabbi Zweck prefers to focus on the happy days when five-year-old Norman first demonstrated his extraordinary linguistic gifts and began mastering foreign languages, one after another, always egged on by his delighted parents. Sarah Zweck had tried to freeze her darling boy in his golden moment when he was nine, refusing to advance his age for three years, and even demanding that his bar mitzvah pass unobserved until he was sixteen. She is now dead, but her maternal folly continues to exact its toll in the consequences of Norman’s arrested development.
The narrative alternates between the daily routine of hospital life in a psychiatric ward and the home life of the guilt-ravaged but sane family members. The strain of Norman’s illness wears on Rabbi Zweck, already weakened by age, care, grief, and the chest pains he hides from Bella’s knowledge. Norman adapts well to hospital life after he locates a supplier of amphetamines among the other patients. But he is haunted by the suicide of his best friend many years earlier and by a guilty awareness of his own contribution to the circumstances of that death; the suicide of his drug dealer disrupts his contented adaptation to hospital life.
Doctors control him with sedation, and when he is finally allowed to emerge from his sleep, he is freed of the cravings and the withdrawal pains, but he suffers an acute sense of guilt and humiliation. He finally understands the punishment he has thrust upon his father and sisters, but this insight comes too late. The Zweck family legacy is a damaged son and two unmarried and childless daughters. In a Job-like despair, Norman sits on his bed and tries to pray, calling on God to help him carry the burdens that God has elected him to bear.
Bernice Rubens provides a humane but unflinching portrait of madness and family dysfunction in her story. Her compassion for Norman and the other members of his ward is deeply felt and effectively communicated. Since readers can see both the outward behavior and the inward motivations of her characters, they are able to achieve sympathy for Norman and for the others whose lives he has destroyed.
Bibliography
Kossick, Shirley. “The Novels of Bernice Rubens: 1960–1992,” Unisa English Studies: Journal of the Department of English 31, no. 2 (1993): 34–40.
Parnell, Michel. “The Novels of Bernice Rubens: An Introduction,” The New Welsh Review (Summer 1990): 43–45.
Categories: British Literature, Jewish Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
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