The last book I read in 2025 was Mona Simpson’s Commitment (2023), and I don’t understand why she’s so revered in the literary community, (“It’s not what you know…”), with all her awards and fellowships and grants. Still, the novel was fairly absorbing, and a touch better than what I’m reading now, David Szalay’s Flesh, which won last year’s once-prestigious Booker Prize. (Flesh is a bore for the first half, but then explodes.)
Simpson’s 400-pager (fat to trim, I think) is about a 1970s Southern California family of four that has a rough go of it, not only because the deadbeat father abandoned wife Diane Aziz, sons Walter and Donnie, and daughter Lina. A main theme is how a perpetually broke brood can make ends meet, especially after Diane is admitted to Orchard Springs for unspecified, or not diagnosed, depression that’s as baffling to the doctors treating her as to readers. Walter, the eldest, has just started college at the University of California at Berkeley, which apparently flips off a switch in Diane’s brain. Like his siblings, Walter (now the de facto patriarch) is very smart and must juggle classes, several part-time jobs, wheedle his way into financial aid and keep track of his family. Also, he’s 18 and understandably, on the lookout for female companionship (and sex), while attempting to fit in with students from more “normal” and wealthy backgrounds.
The story concludes in the 1980s, with unpredictable results, to Simpson’s credit. No real cliff-hangers, but several twists in this matter-of-fact book. Walter becomes a successful and wealthy architect/developer, but gives up a lot in the bargain. His obligation to family, and his mother’s strange condition, leaves him anesthetized to life. He marries a woman who’s “right” for his aspirations, but it’s a relationship that has no “tingle,” as he puts it, with little passion. It’s a melancholy trajectory, one that Walter muses about on occasion, when he has time. It’s not a tragic lifestyle, and probably not uncommon, but his apparent desire to live a full life and then fade away is probably the best he can do. Did his mother’s deteriorating condition cause this? Hard to tell, since Simpson rarely dips into the pre-depression past, when the Azis’ were a financially-strapped but happy family.
Writing a contemporary review of the book in The New York Times, Elizabeth Egan begins: “If you are lucky enough to have come of age in a time when seeking treatment for anxiety is akin to, say, visiting a dermatologist for acne, you might have some trouble getting your bearings in “Commitment,” Mona Simpson’s generously proportioned, gently powerful seventh novel.”
That’s too flip. The mid-1970s to early-1980s, as far as depression and substance abuse, wasn’t like 1910. (At college in 1974, there was an excellent medical building on campus for depression; I received tetracycline there for acne.) For example, the youngest child, Donnie, a precocious early teen when the novel begins, starts hanging out with a “bad crowd,” and lands in rehab for all-day marijuana consumption. That’s sensible, I suppose (although I knew many potheads at the time who drifted in and out of daydreams and then straightened out), but Donnie’s in treatment and therapy for four years, most of which he spends working on his 10 steps and visiting his deteriorating mother.
It strains credulity, even if the locale’s California. Lina’s more grounded, but worries constantly about the quality of her art, has a number of boyfriends in New York City, and is engaged to a man who sparks the tingle, but that wedding is called off because the prospective groom’s parents fear that Diane’s disease is hereditary and likely to pass down to any progeny. The wormboy boyfriend accedes to his parents’ wishes and that’s that. Lina’s a tough cookie, though, and by the novel’s conclusion, appears to have a better sense of reality than Walter or Donnie.
I did like this snippet from Walter about his estranged father: “Once in a while, people asked Walter about his real father. He hated the phrase. Guy [Aziz] was more like a sperm donor. ‘One day I’ll get a call and learn that he died. I’ll hang up the phone and eat my lunch.’”
The picture above shows my wife Melissa reading to four-year-old Nicky at a house we stayed one summer in Nantucket. I’ve no idea what younger Booker is doing; perhaps examining an insect, armed with a Power Ranger freebie from McDonald’s.
Take a look at the clues to figure out the year: Allen Ginsberg writes his last poem; Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, Will Self’s Great Apes, Ted Hughes’ Tales from Ovid and Peter Maas’ Underboss are published; Yungblud is born and Jimmy Stewart dies; Anthony Hecht wins the Wallace Stevens Award; Trent Lott is the Senate Majority Leader; the Green Bay Packers win the Super Bowl; Liar Liar is released, and is seventh highest-grossing film of the year; Mike Tyson bites off part of Evander Holyfield’s ear; the first color photo appears on the front page of The New York Times; Kyle Tucker is born and Robert Mitchum dies; Interleague play begins in MLB, an awful idea designed to spike attendance; the Toronto Argonauts win the Grey Cup; Bangladesh wins cricket’s ICC trophy; Germany’s Jan Ullrich takes the Tour de France; Touch Gold wins the Belmont Stakes; and the reunited Monkees play two sold-out concerts in London.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023