Commitment
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.
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 drive 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.
Physical book
Acclaim for Commitment
“Stunning…a minimalist masterpiece, exploring the large and small ways that a diagnosis of mental illness affects a family. In a story utterly devoid of car crashes, murders, abductions and explosions, Simpson bears down on the truly important questions about life — home, work, love and family.”
—Ann Levin, The Washington Post
“Vivid . . . Excellent . . . An absorbing, moving portrait of a Los Angeles family as they navigate financial troubles, addiction and, centrally, mental illness . . . As Simpson follows the kids into adulthood, where their lives and careers split and intersect, the reverberations of their childhoods ripple forward, too . . . [Commitment captures] the pain and joy and strangeness of being a person in a family.”
—Keziah Weir, Vanity Fair
“Few novelists write about America as Mona Simpson does, with her acute understanding of the tension between external forces—economy, technology, society—and individual dreams, between nostalgia and the future, between yearning and deception. Commitment is a majestic novel about an American family and an American century, its vision and scope bringing to mind the work of Tolstoy, Stendahl, and Balzac.”
—Yiyun Li, author of The Book of Goose
“The tale of these three siblings and their troubled mother unfolds with such subtle wisdom, such stately grace, that it’s easy to take for granted the artistry of the telling. Mona Simpson offers in small, absorbing increments a family’s encounters with hardship and grief, and ambition, avoiding as she does any hackneyed response—rancor, for instance, or indictment—and providing instead, with utter honesty, a paean to the resilience of familial love.”
—Alice McDermott, author of The Ninth Hour
“A powerful family love story propelled by Simpson’s profound understanding of people tested by that which could destroy them. Here are three children whose loyalty is divided for years between what might be best for their depressive mother and the paths that could allow them to have meaningful lives. In this beautifully written novel, the constant emotional and financial struggles make their hard-won triumphs, large and small, that much more glorious.”
—Amy Hempel, author of Sing to It
“It’s a survival story…generously proportioned, gently powerful…Simpson has clearly done her research [and] the fruits of her labor add texture to an already hefty story.”
—Elisabeth Egan, The New York Times
“Simpson fills her seventh novel with wisdom, strength, and humanity..”
—Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times
“Simpson’s latest is an astute tale of family trauma and resilience.”
—People Magazine
“Commitment manages to be both a model of the intricate network of familiar coordinates—love, money, art, work—and an intimate portrait of each individual caught, for better or worse, in its web . . . Larger social, cultural and emotional strains [are] sharply and movingly conveyed . . . Commitment does seem to take [George Eliot’s Middlemarch] for a template of sorts—updated for a world where ‘commitment’ is forever being redefined, but love abides.”
— Ellen Akins, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“A heartbreaker . . . Deeply felt . . . Detailing the lives of a single mother who falls into a deep depression, and her three children, who suddenly must cope on their own.”
—Jim Kelly, Air Mail
“The questions [Simpson] explores throughout Commitment are nuanced. How much are we in control of our own stories? How much of our lives do we spend chasing the security we think we knew as children, and how futile is that effort? . . . Simpson’s affinity for [stories about American families] hasn’t waned. Nor has her skill at exploring it in various modes.”
—Mark Athitakis, Alta
“Simpson is a national treasure. Commitment is a sweeping family epic that took me from one American coast to another, through a difficult but unforgettable time period, and through the growing pains of three remarkable siblings. I was immersed in their world and in Simpson’s masterful vision for them. Simpson is so attuned to the family heart and oh dear Walter, Lina, and Donnie, have you forever moved mine.”
—Weike Wang, author of Joan Is Okay
Commitment
Excerpt
Dino called to ask Donnie why he didn’t see Evan anymore. He said it might be good if the boys could get together. It would mean a lot to Evan.
Donnie liked Evan fine. He’d just been busy for kind of a long time. People asked him to go to the beach at night. He rode along and sat in front of the big bonfires they built in the sand, sometimes getting up to find a piece of driftwood to throw onto the pyre. This is what high school kids did in Los Angeles during the seventies. They packed themselves into cars on cold nights and drove to Santa Monica, then trudged through the marine layer toward the loud waves. They lit fires in pits already dug out, lined with ashes and bits of charcoaled wood from older embers. They cooked hot dogs on long sticks and roasted marshmallows with a somber air. Some of them stalked off in pairs, to find a spot far enough away from the circle to feel alone on the sand under a blanket, to talk about their secrets, which mostly had to do with their parents’ sadness, and so the shapes their bodies made together couldn’t be seen. But Donnie just sat, hugging his knees, and stared into the flames. It felt important to be here at the edge of the world late at night, uncomfortable, the cold of deep sand seeping up, even through blankets.
A few kids had cars; many more jammed into them. Others hitched rides home. Most stopped at Ships all-night diner for hot single-dish pie à la mode before returning to their sleeping, troubled houses, which seemed more peaceful in the dark.
Before he got off the phone, Donnie asked Dino how he was.
Okay, Dino said. Still the same.
Did you pass that test you were always dreading?
No. I’m taking some time off. Getting some things together. Then I’ll go back and take it again. How’s your sister? She still liking school?
The day after that call, Donnie went to the computer room, but Evan now played games that he didn’t understand. They tried to start a round of Chinese chess, but nothing took. Donnie didn’t return to the computer room, but whenever he saw Evan in the halls, he invited him to the beach with people on the coming weekend. And once, November of junior year, Evan went. He sat in his creased khakis next to Donnie on the uncomfortable sand. People offered him food from the long sticks, but other than that they went over and around him the way they would a log or a rock. Evan didn’t like any of it, he could tell. Evan shook his head like a bird shaking water out of its feathers. He left at ten, walking to the pay phone to call Dino to pick him up. Donnie closed his eyes, listening to the waves boom.
Dino didn’t call Donnie again, and when Donnie saw Evan in the halls that year, he seemed happier. He understood that they couldn’t follow each other where they were going. It was a real break, but nothing mean.
That November night on the beach, before Evan left, Donnie had asked, “How’s your family? Your mom still cooking?”
“It’s a little better now that I’m the only one left,” he said. “She has no excuse for making stuff I hate. And some of it, I’ve started to eat.” Evan thought he was heading the wrong way, Donnie knew, toward stupidity and even danger. But there was nothing Donnie could do: this was his one and only life.