As for Leo, giving up Helen Baum is more painful than he expected: “If he cannot find a way to forget his beloved he will have nothing to look forward to but the energetic efforts of his community: matchmaking at Chanukkah cabarets and vegetarian Seder sing-alongs, eyelash-fluttering over the book of Leviticus, Tuesday night Older Singles Mingles. He might as well be dead.”"When We Were Bad” is more than a highly patterned English domestic farce. The literary critic Lorna Sage referred to the “festive rhythm” in Iris Murdoch’s writing, and Mendelson’s prose has even more swing and zing. There’s no shortage of wry byplay and observation: Norman debating “which of the Queen’s sons seems most Jewish”; Frances’ young stepdaughters settled on the sofa, “comparing their inner lips”; Frances evading responsibility in the loo, “rolling her forehead on the calcified tiles, lowing softly like a calf, to pull herself together.” The hyperarticulate Rubins, so adept at using language to avoid communicating, are aware of how it can wound. When Claudia admits that she’s known about Norman’s book all along, she adds, “And it’s good for your career. What happens within a marriage is not the issue here.” Norman can’t even respond — “Never has an indefinite article frightened him more.”Whether choreographing on a grand scale — Claudia’s post-wedding-snafu image management includes a Seder extravaganza — or more intimately, Mendelson has a tenderness for her muddled creations.

There’s an amused empathy in her channeling of Claudia’s certitude (by no means as firm as the rabbi would like), of Leo’s hopes that pornography will end his obsession with Helen Baum, or of Norman’s feel-bad reveries on Hampstead Heath as he watches “a particularly windswept cat fancier. stamping her way up the slope toward him.” While he ponders the unquotable thing this woman needs, he’s in for a short, sharp shock: “Oh my God. It is his daughter.” And this is only one of the book’s many moments of recognition that flicker between mortification and heartache.Mendelson also offers a cornucopia of Jewish characters. There are those who go to Claudia’s ‘gogue, as Sim calls it, now that it’s cool; there are the devout; there are the inhabitants of Brent Cross, which is “too suburban-Jewish for the Rubins; they roll their r’s when they speak of it, to show it is a place where others go.” The Rubins define the ideal Jew by what he isn’t: Frances’ admirable husband is “neither a so-called Anglo-Jew with class delusions, nor a glamorous Sephardi, nor, God forbid, a frummer with rude Israeli relatives and sisters in pancake wigs. Like them he believes unthinkingly in a cross but vaguely humorous God.”It would be easy to categorize “When We Were Bad” as “Jewish fiction” (though considerably more difficult to debate what that entails), but Mendelson has produced something much rarer — a novel that wittily and searingly explores the relationships between parents and their adult children.

Some will compare it to “Disobedience,” Naomi Alderman’s novel of inheritance and expectation, which won the 2006 Orange Prize for New Writers. Though “Disobedience” is also set in north London, its world of Orthodox Jews is more closed than Claudia’s trendy domain. Alderman’s and Mendelson’s novels (along with those of, for instance, Howard Jacobson and the late Bernice Rubens) intrigue because they explore English families who happen to be Jewish. Or is it Jewish families who happen to be English? (Bryan Cheyette, who has written extensively on British-Jewish literature, points out: “As Jewish writers are thought not to exist in Britain, the common reaction to my eccentric enthusiasm has been, until recent years, incredulity.”) Certainly the themes of invisibility and renunciation that ruffle “Disobedience,” and to a lesser extent “When We Were Bad,” wouldn’t be out of place in, say, the 1945 British weepy “Brief Encounter” — or, for that matter, in much early gay fiction.

“So many people do not want her to be successful,” Claudia thinks, “the competitive; the bigoted; the envious; those who insist all English Jews must keep their heads down, in that crouching self-loathing way she cannot stand.”But “When We Were Bad” isn’t for one minute a plea for understanding — or, worse, tolerance. It’s too probing, too rammed with sensuous possibility, too gleefully inventive, to be fiction as PR. In “Writing About Jews,” Philip Roth declared: “To confuse a ‘balanced portrayal’ with a novel is finally to be led into absurdities.” Absurdities (of the best sort) — and even deep variations on clichés; the overpowering Jewish mother, for one — abound in “When We Were Bad.” And Charlotte Mendelson morphs them into an elegant comedy of longing and survival.–From ‘When We Were Bad’:For her eighth birthday, when other girls were begging for guinea pigs or Victorian dollhouses with removable frontage, Frances decided to ask for her father. She requested that he take her on a trip to the British Museum and, despite the many ways this might have hurt the others’ feelings, Norman agreed The journey involved two buses and St Pancras station in the snow.

He brought provisions: raisins and a sat-upon cheese sandwich, leathery inside its cling-film wrapping, like the meat Attila carried under his saddle.”We’re Huns,” she said, and he had smiled. Their conversation was a little halting but she had never been happier — except, of course, for worrying about what to do if he died here, so far from home.. Daniel Curet was a contented apartment dweller looking for an Eastside investment property a few years ago when his plans took a sudden turn on a narrow, winding road in Lincoln Heights.There, he and his partner, Andrew Zygmunt, came across a bland, worn-at-the-edges duplex perched on a weedy hillside lot.The house was so large, at nearly 3,000 square feet, and the views of downtown so striking, that a new idea emerged:”We could really live here,” Curet recalled thinking.And so began a two-year, $300,000 remodeling odyssey that started with a $459,000 purchase in January 2005 and culminated this year with two colorful, contemporary, upscale, bamboo-floored units — one for the couple and one for their $1,700-a-month tenants.Although the fluctuating market has left Curet, 46, a bit upside-down on his investment — he owes more than the property is worth today — he’s not concerned.”We’re not looking to sell,” he said, “so it doesn’t matter.”To orchestrate the remodel, Curet, a hairdresser for the entertainment industry, acted as general contractor, hiring the various subcontractors to do the work. He ended up with a crew that brought an intercontinental flair to the project: Architect Marcelo Ciccone is Argentine; carpenter Nigel Bruce is English; mural artist Alvino Najar is of Jordanian, Mexican and Spanish descent; interior designer Cheryl Gardner is from New York.The strategy was to remodel the rental unit first and then remodel their own unit with slightly higher-grade materials and an expanded floor plan.When the duplex was built, each 1,300-square-foot unit — mirror images sitting side by side — had an upstairs consisting of a living room, kitchen, two bedrooms and a bathroom, and a downstairs with another bedroom and bathroom.However, in what would become the owner unit, the previous owner had dug back into the hillside downstairs and created a fully permitted den adjacent to the existing bedroom.