Norman Zweck sees silverfish everywhere he goes. This would be pretty alarming for anyone (on the odd occasion I see one of those creatures they make my skin crawl) but for Norman, a previously successful barrister and “the clever one” in his family, this has the effect of literally driving him mad.
The silverfish are a side-effect of Norman’s addiction to amphetamines, which have destroyed his career and are now destroying his mind. His father, the elderly Rabbi Zweck, and his sister Bella, decide that the only option for them is to commit him to a mental institution. Norman, however, feels that he has been made the scapegoat for the family’s emotional problems, which Rubens gradually reveals throughout the novel’s course. Most of these could arguably be attributed to Norman’s deceased mother, the smothering but cruel Sarah, who seems to ultimately be the cause of every family member’s present misery; her unwillingness to let her children live their own lives leads Norman to drug-taking and Bella to closet herself in a world of childish make-believe, so that she feels that she has never grown up; she still wears her girlish white lace socks, even though she is now in her forties.
We also see the devastating effect that the claustrophobic Zweck household has had on their youngest daughter Esther. The former golden girl of the family, wrapped up in her scriptural studies in the synagogue, her father casts her out when he discovers that she has eloped to marry a man who is not Jewish. Her need to run away was rash however, and she is now trapped in a household where she feels no love for her husband (the saintly sinner John, who knows their marriage will never be consummated but who loves his wife nonetheless). Desperate for her father’s forgiveness but afraid to see him for fear of what he will say, she sits at home alone and worries about what the rest of the family are doing.
Norman is the novel’s focus, and it is through his interactions with the other characters that we witness the flaws in their own lives. The fact that Norman’s problem is not as socially acceptable as that of the others is his reason for committal, but ultimately we get the impression that the entire family are just as bad as each other. Sarah’s love has suffocated the entire family, to the point that they are all mad in their own ways. Rubens’ portrayal of a family coping with a crisis is dark and poignant but is a masterful portrayal of human frailty and a similar message can be drawn from it as that famously made by Philip Larkin in one of his poems: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”.
