Commitment

Description

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 LA to college, it will be her last parental act before falling into a deep depression. A single mother who believes that her children can attain all the things she hasn't, she's worked hard to secure their future. But when she enters hospital, her closest friend must keep the children safe and their mother's dreams for them alive. At Berkeley, Walter discovers a passion for architecture just as he realises his life as a student may end for lack of funds. Back home in LA, his sister Lina works in an ice-cream parlour while her wealthy classmates prepare for Ivy league schools, as she wages a high-stakes gamble to go there with them. And Donny, the little brother everybody loves, begins to drift towards a life on the beach, where he falls into an escalating relationship with drugs. A resonant story about family, duty, and the attendant struggles that come when a parent falls ill, it honours the spirit of imperfect mothers, and the under-chronicled significance of friends. With Commitment, Mona Simpson has written her most important and unforgettable novel. '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

MONA SIMPSON is the author of Anywhere But Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy, Off Keck Road, My Hollywood, and Casebook. She has received a Whiting Writer's award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton, an NEA fellowship, a Guggenheim grant, a Lila Wallace Prize, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Mary McCarthy Prize. Off Keck Road was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and won the Heartland Prize from the Chicago Tribune. She was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is the publisher of The Paris Review, where she worked as an editor in her twenties. She lives in Santa Monica, California. She's on the faculty at UCLA, where she often teaches Middlemarch.

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 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