ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS 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.
