Commitment

A Novel

By: Mona Simpson

Narrated by: Xe Sands

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.

©2023 Mona Simpson (P)2023 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“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. … Commitment makes the case in a quiet but insistent voice that our lives do matter, even if other people think they are broken.” —Ann Levin, Associated Press / 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

“Simpson’s latest is an astute tale of family trauma and resilience.” —People Magazine

Boring

I have one hour left and I'm struggling to get through it. just a life of privilege. everything works out for everyone.

Family

The story of a mother, her 3 children and her best friend. When the mother is hospitalized for mental illness, the friend steps in as a sort of surrogate and stays in all of their lives. This is about how a family copes, children grow up and friends remain. Well written

Excellent

Great story, well written. It petered out a bit as the kids grew up but overall, well worth a credit. Compelling, particularly for anyone who grew up with a mentally I’ll mother in the 1960s and 1970s

Beautifully told

A beautifully written, thoughtful history of a family in crisis when there were few options for the mentally ill. The resilience of the characters and their ability to live their lives despite their mother’s absence is inspiring.

strong start that slides into boring and mediocre

Great idea for the plot, which starts off strong about a family in crisis. By the end, it seems as if the author ran out of steam to keep with the soul-searching, soul-revealing conflicts both internally and amongst the three siblings. Yes, she gives lip service to the soul searching but the characters are flat and two dimensional by the end.
Julie, a major player in the story, is never drawn as a character, the reader has to accept at face value what the author tells us.
And the actual plot makes no sense by the end, given the very realistic start.
It idd hold my attention, however after I finished it, I felt that it wasn't worth 14 hours of my time.