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June 29, 2023
Mona Simpson's Commitment feints at a compelling campus class drama, then unfurls into an even more stirring cartography of the impacts of a mother's deteriorating mental health on her three children.
At the novel's outset in 1973, Walter Aziz is 19 and leaving their S°Cal tableau for college at Berkeley, Lina is 17 and an Ivy-ambitious junior, and Donnie is an inchoate 13. All three flaunt some kind of aesthetic talent-Walter dreams of building architectural utopias; Lina draws and sculpts; Donnie can polish and thrift an unremarkable room into beauty, as their mother modeled through the many apartments of their upbringing. We learn through the children's point of view, mostly Walter's, that their Afghan father hails from a wealthy family but has been serially absent from their lives. We also learn that their mother Diane represents an unusual success story, as a child reared in an orphanage who still managed to put herself through college and nursing school and then begin a medical career-no small feat even for a woman of ritzier means in 1950s America.
Commitment presents the best argument for mothers going to therapy that I have ever read.
In the book's true inciting event, Diane takes to bed and doesn't get up-first for days, then weeks, then long enough to menace what little job and housing security the family owns, until that family has no choice but to commit her to a state-funded mental hospital. The reader recognizes Diane's malady as catastrophic depression and prescription drug addiction, but the children of the 1970s lack this understanding or language. Also, their more urgent concern is how to prevent the electricity from being shut off, or their boarder from calling Child Protective Services. A miracle-performing family friend, Julie, steps in as guardian, but the cascading effects of Diane's involuntary and profoundly sad resignation from head-of-household responsibilities resound throughout the novel. (Commitment presents the best argument for mothers going to...