Commitment
A novel
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3.8 • 30 Ratings
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
A NEW YORKER AND LOS ANGELES TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A masterful and engrossing novel about a single mother’s collapse and the fate of her family after she enters a California state hospital in the 1970s.
“A sweeping family epic that took me from one American coast to another…Simpson is so attuned to the family heart.” —Weike Wang, author of Joan Is Okay
When Diane Aziz drives her oldest son, Walter, from Los Angeles to college at UC Berkeley, it will be her last parental act before falling into a deep depression. A single mother who maintains a wishful belief that her children can attain all the things she hasn’t, she’s worked hard to secure their future in caste-driven 1980s Los Angeles, gaining them illegal entry to an affluent public school. When she enters a state hospital, her closest friend tries to keep the children safe and their mother’s dreams for them alive.
At Berkeley, Walter discovers a passion for architecture just as he realizes his life as a student may need to end for lack of funds. Back home in LA, his sister, Lina, who works in an ice-cream parlor while her wealthy classmates are preparing for Ivy league schools, wages a high stakes gamble to go there with them. And Donny, the little brother everybody loves, begins to hide in plain sight, coding, gaming, and drifting towards a life on the beach, where he falls into an escalating relationship with drugs.
Moving from Berkeley and Los Angeles to New York and back again, this is a story about one family trying to navigate the crisis of their lives, a crisis many know first-hand in their own families or in those of their neighbors. A resonant novel about family and duty and the attendant struggles that come when a parent falls ill, Commitment honors the spirit of fragile, imperfect mothers and the under-chronicled significance of friends, in determining the lives of our children left on their own. With Commitment, Mona Simpson, one of the foremost chroniclers of the American family in our time, has written her most important and unforgettable novel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Simpson (Casebook) follows the paths of three siblings after their mother's mental health breakdown in her well-drawn latest. After Walter Aziz, the oldest, leaves Los Angeles to attend UC Berkeley, Diane, a single mother, overwhelmed by the depression that has stalked her for most of her life, stops going to work and eventually signs herself into a psychiatric hospital, leaving behind Walter's sister, Lina, a high school senior, and younger brother, Donnie. As their mother's best friend steps up to take care of the children, they grapple with how to proceed. Lina works in an ice-cream shop and wants to head east for college; Walter, having discovered a passion for architecture, questions whether he can pursue a field in which aesthetics are valued above utility; and Donnie drifts aimlessly along Southern California's beaches. Their mother's breakdown distances them emotionally from their peers. Walter, invited to attend a sorority party on campus, gives his regrets, overwhelmed by a sense of obligation to his family: "I have a smaller world now." Lina, meanwhile, envies the "breeziness" exuding from the homes of her more stable friends. Simpson foregoes surprises or dramatic turns, drawing readers instead with deep and tender considerations of her characters, as they're forced to learn hard truths while still in the prime of their youths. Fans of family chronicles will not be disappointed.
Customer Reviews
Family
Amazing what these kids had to live through with committing their mom to an institution when they were very young. It was an amazing story of commitment on many levels by many of the characters.
The story
Great writing I became to know the characters and cared what happened to them.