FAMILIES – CAN’T live with them, all too tempting to live without them. Literature, of course, would be lesser without them: there is no more fecund ground for the novel, in particular. Fecund, and yet, testing. For where comedy and tragedy are bedfellows, and spirits may be cracked over the breakfast eggs, the threat of schmaltz lurks around every corner and only the accomplished authorial eye can be sufficiently dispassionate to see the wood from the familial trees.

Charlotte Mendelson’s When We Were Bad will take its place among classic accounts of tribal misadventure with the same apparent effortlessness that proves so pleasurable in her writing. Rarely can readers of contemporary fiction feel themselves to be in such safe hands. How her editors must have thrilled when presented with such an impeccable novel.

The family in question is the Rubins; a unit not merely Jewish, but rabbinical, and yet instantly recognisable to the most goyish reader. Mendelson structures the narrative around a series of festivities, from the eldest son’s abortive nuptials to a buttock-clenchingly ghastly Passover. Around these events the Rubins revolve: an ostensible collective alone in their differing dysfunctions, each with some unity-imperilling secret. Pater familias Norman – bumbling, loving, thwarted; Sim and Em, his comely yet repulsive younger offspring – job-less, infantilised, bound to the family home; Leo and Frances, the good children whose account of being bad this is. This being a Jewish clan, there must also be a matriarch: the awesomely glamorous Rabbi Claudia Rubin – pillar of the community, media Jew, a creation that the author manages to make both poignant and repugnant.

Mendelson captures the allure such clammy collectives can hold for nonfamily members, forever pressing their noses up against the glass without realising that those behind it are trapped, clamouring to escape. And in Leo and Frances she reveals the snaking wretchedness of those for whom home is a misnomer.

This is not a funny novel, but it creates the same feel-good effect, despite the many miseries it describes. Mendelson is good on food, fond of a gustatory metaphor, and there is something delectably satisfying in her writing – an indulgence one can relish without fear of crass note. Her characters manifest that consummate novelistic accomplishment: fiction with the air of reportage. Like one’s own nearest and sometime dearest, the Rubins don’t appear written, they just are.

WHEN WE WERE BAD by Charlotte Mendelson

Picador, £12.99; 304pp

By the book here for the offer price of £11.69 (free p&p)

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

Times Recommends

• The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway
• Burning is too good for them
• Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides Are Wrong in the Race Debate by Kenan Malik