The Elected Member

The Elected Member is a novel by the British writer Bernice Rubens, published in 1969. It won the Booker Prize the following year, and it is set among a Jewish family in the East End of London.

Norman Zweck is the clever one of the family. He was an infant prodigy, he became a brilliant barrister, and his parents built their expectations around him, which makes his position at forty-one all the harder for everyone to understand. He is addicted to drugs, confined to his bedroom, and living with hallucinations and paranoia that the people around him cannot follow.

His committal to a mental hospital sets the novel going. From there it looks back over the family's history, at the relationships between the parents and their children and at the pressure that a family puts on the one it has decided is gifted. The novel is told largely from inside those expectations, and its central question is what happens to the child who was supposed to succeed. Rubens writes about the East End Jewish community from inside it, and the book was her fourth novel.