The Elected Member

My stop and start effort to read each book that has won England's Booker Prize got a big boost a couple weeks ago when my wife and I got our Atlanta library cards. Many of the early Booker Prize winners from the 1970s are out-of-print or hard to find, but a few minutes with the library's online catalogs and some hold requests landed the first five books in my hands.

I just finished Bernice Rubens' The Elected Member, which won the 1970 prize, the second year the Booker Prize was given. It is an insightful look at the neurotic workings of a Jewish family, the neurotic workings of a drug addicted hallucinatory mind, and the interaction between the two. If Philip Roth had written One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and set the book in England, this is probably what would have emerged.

In fact, the book need hardly be set in England. The immigrant Jewish experience is sufficiently universal that the setting could easily have come from Roth, or from Bernard Malamud's The Assistant. This is made all the more poignant considering Rubens' family history:

Her father, Eli Rubens, was a Lithuanian Jew who thought he was escaping anti-semitism for America when he boarded his ship at Hamburg around 1900. But the ticket tout had swindled him: he was shoved off at Cardiff. It was a fortnight before he realised he wasn't in New York.

And I was actually twenty or thirty pages into the book before I remembered that I was reading a British author, and that the book was not set in New York or Chicago. For fans of Roth or Bellow, there is a lot here to like. And since Rubens was a rather prolific author, there is plenty more to enjoy if this strikes your fancy. That's one of the reasons I am doing this Booker Prize project. It is not that I suppose the Booker judges have somehow magically selected the best book every year. But it is an easy way to become exposed to a number of non-American authors who might emerge as personal favorites, a la Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang and Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin.