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Summary
Summary
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST * Named a Top 10 Best Book of the Year by The New York Times , The Wall Street Journal , The Atlantic , Slate , and People
One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2023
"Brave and nuanced . . . an act of tremendous compassion and a literary triumph." -- The New York Times
"Immensely emotional and unforgettably haunting." --The Wall Street Journal
Acclaimed author Jonathan Rosen's haunting investigation of the forces that led his closest childhood friend, Michael Laudor, from the heights of brilliant promise to the forensic psychiatric hospital where he has lived since killing the woman he loved. A story about friendship, love, and the price of self-delusion, The Best Minds explores the ways in which we understand--and fail to understand--mental illness.
When the Rosens moved to New Rochelle in 1973, Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor became inseparable. Both children of college professors, the boys were best friends and keen competitors, and, when they both got into Yale University, seemed set to join the American meritocratic elite.
Michael blazed through college in three years, graduating summa cum laude and landing a top-flight consulting job. But all wasn't as it seemed. One day, Jonathan received the call: Michael had suffered a serious psychotic break and was in the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital.
Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, Michael was still battling delusions when he traded his halfway house for Yale Law School. Featured in The New York Times as a role model genius, he sold a memoir, with film rights to Ron Howard. But then Michael, in the grip of an unshakeable paranoid fantasy, stabbed his girlfriend Carrie to death and became a front-page story of an entirely different sort.
Tender, funny, and harrowing by turns, The Best Minds is Jonathan Rosen's magnificent and heartbreaking account of good intentions and tragic outcomes whose significance will echo widely.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this dazzling memoir, essayist Rosen (The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature) chronicles his thorny relationship with his childhood friend Michael Laudor, a lawyer and disability rights advocate who made headlines in 1998 for murdering his fiancée during a paranoid episode. The boys met as neighbors in a tight-knit New Rochelle, N.Y., Jewish community and attended Yale University together. Laudor graduated in three years but quickly began having delusions, carrying a baseball bat to bed at his parents' house because he believed they'd been replaced by Nazis. He was eventually diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and Rosen traces Laudor's cycles of recovery and relapse with an empathetic but still circumspect eye, charting the impact of Laudor's disease on others, including his law school dean, rabbi, and the officer who arrested him after the murder. Rosen also takes a sweeping look at shifting views on mental illness, from the political revolutionaries of the 1970s who aligned an open embrace of mental illness with communist philosophy to the deinstitutionalization trend of the '80s. This lands as both a breathtaking and tragic portrait of a man with vast potential and a reckoning on how schizophrenia is treated and understood. This is a tough one to forget. Agent: Suzanne Gluck, William Morris Endeavor. (Apr.)
Guardian Review
There's a feeling you get rewatching a movie that ends in disaster. A hope against hope that this time the hero will cheat fate; that the captain of the Titanic's desperate attempts to swerve the iceberg will pay off. Maybe that tear in the hull isn't as bad as it looks? Though the jacket of The Best Minds, novelist Jonathan Rosen's extraordinary account of his friend Michael Laudor's mental illness, speaks only of a "horrific act" committed by its subject, readers are well aware that something dreadful is coming. It is testament to the author's ability to immerse us in the world he builds that this doesn't stop us from willing a different outcome, feeling that every success might just stick, and each calamity could in fact be a temporary setback. In doing so we mirror the reactions of those around Laudor at the time, from friends to teachers to the titans of media and Hollywood - reactions that arguably helped seal his fate and that of his fiancee, Carrie Costello. To say that this is a memoir, a case study, or a book about schizophrenia is to dramatically undersell it. Though Rosen's lens is particular, his view is panoptic. This is a magisterial work, as much a sociological study of late 20th-century America as it is a book about madness. It is also a book about childhood and friendship, the long shadow of the second world war and its unexpected intellectual legacy, about ambition and delusion and the danger of stories. Despite weighing in at more than 500 pages, the narrative scarcely drags thanks to Rosen's style, which is easygoing, but spiced with moments of pin-sharp brilliance. It opens in 1973, when the boys are just 10, and Jonathan has moved to Michael's street in New Rochelle, about 30 minutes from Manhattan. He paints a wistful portrait of Goonies-style camaraderie amid suburban lawns, of scrapes and adventures, of play-acting adulthood in the offices of the high school newspaper. Despite being the same age, dazzling Michael has all the attributes of an older brother: academically way ahead, charming, somehow already worldly. Everyone knows him, or wants to. The relationship gradually sharpens into something more competitive. Michael fails to help when Jonathan is beaten up on the way home from school; Jonathan is made editor-in-chief, a job Michael wanted. Even so, New Rochelle represents a mythic period that will reverberate for both of them. Much later, Jonathan reflects how "we carried the world of each other's childhood in our pockets like a kryptonite pebble, a fragment of the home planet". Around them, society was being reshaped in ways that would prove decisive, at least for Michael. Various currents - Kennedy-era optimism, the counterculture, poststructuralist theory - had converged on the idea that severely mentally ill people ought to be treated differently than in the past. Perhaps their symptoms were a pertinent critique of a civilisation that had lost its way; maybe they were the sane ones in a mad world. The upshot was that most mental hospitals were earmarked for closure, with care to take place in communities instead. Making someone take drugs, or admitting them to a ward against their will, became much harder. And though reform of asylums - which were clearly not living up to their name - was a laudable goal, in reality their closure disgorged thousands of ill and dependent people into a void. Hopeful words about community-based treatment were not matched by hard cash. Asylums were in fact swapped for prisons, as more and more found themselves drawn into the arms of law enforcement, rather than medical care. Before long, Michael was in hospital. He had begun to believe his parents were evil doubles, sent by Nazis All of this would eventually become painfully relevant. In the meantime, though, both young men won places at Yale, with Michael completing his degree a year early, despite the strange hours he kept and the "long hibernatory sleeps" his roommates took for the foibles of a genius. While Jonathan worked in the canteen to make ends meet, Michael sailed into a high-pressure consulting job, where he began to show signs of paranoia, imagining that the company was bugging his phone. He quit, planning to return to Yale Law School for graduate study. But before long, he was in hospital. He had begun to believe his parents were evil doubles, sent by Nazis. In a moment of lucidity, he allowed his father to convince him to check himself in for treatment. Slowly, and with a horrible burden of side-effects from antipsychotic medication, Michael began to recover. A place at Yale Law was still on the table, and he decided to be upfront about his diagnosis of schizophrenia. The faculty felt it would reflect well on them to accept him - to support a brilliant man with an unfortunate disability. At that moment, Michael's story switched: from high-flyer with clipped wings to poster boy for success against the odds. And yet he was far from "back to normal". "Every morning," Rosen explains, "he opened his eyes and found his room on fire ¿ Every morning, he lay in bed paralyzed with fear until his father called and told him the flames weren't real. His father didn't just tell him; he proved it. Ordering Michael to put out a hand and touch the fire, he asked him what he felt. 'Does it burn?' his father asked. 'Does it burn? No? Good!'" After the New York Times published a profile of him, his life took on a dizzying forward momentum: a publishing deal was followed, incredibly, by a full- fledged plan for a Hollywood movie charting his triumph over psychosis. Leonardo DiCaprio was to play the lead, and during script meetings he wore a Walkman that played a stream of jumbled voices, screams and gunshots in an attempt to mimic auditory hallucinations. Michael found himself suddenly rich. He moved with his girlfriend, Carrie, a computer engineer, to leafy Hastings-on-Hudson in New York state, where, his studies over, he would hole up to work on the book. Instead, he unravelled. No one could make him take his medicine, and the brutal, unrelenting nature of his disease reasserted itself, a terrifying rebuke to the optimism of those who believed coercion had no place in the treatment of schizophrenia; to the professors who saw his participation in their classes as a sign of their enlightenment, rather than an added pressure on a vulnerable man; to the storytellers who thought their sanitising of the reality of severe mental illness would not only reduce stigma, but sell papers, books and movie tickets. Michael's delusion that his loved ones had been replaced by impostors returned. He began to believe that Carrie was a replica and that the only way to keep himself safe was to kill her, and their unborn child. Rosen brings a stunned realism to the description of what follows. After such a painstaking reconstruction of his and Laudor's shared world, the denouement feels viscerally shocking. But his real achievement is that, by mapping this heartbreaking story from every angle, he has refused to reduce its complexity. Yes, it is an injustice that Carrie's life will never be subject to the same close examination as Michael's. Yes, it is alarming to have to convey the message that untreated schizophrenia can result in violence. Yes, Michael was brilliant, but brilliance and sanity are not the same thing. Almost every harm in this story is the result of good intentions, and there are no easy answers. Except, perhaps one: if it's the kind of movie where the iceberg glances off the ship without doing much damage, then it is probably too good to be true.
Kirkus Review
An account of a brilliant young man brought down by schizophrenia, with lives shattered all around him. The subject of Rosen's book, Michael Laudor, had a capacious and wide-ranging mind, taking in higher learning and popular culture alike. "Michael and I grew up in a Norman Rockwell painting," writes the author. In fact, Rockwell lived in and set paintings in their town, a suburban idyll. Laudor and Rosen excelled while living out a late baby boomer existence in academic homes among Holocaust survivors, yet with ominous shadows on the horizon. As Rosen writes, "the culture had prepared us for David Berkowitz," the poster child for mental illness presented as satanic evil. Laudor was somewhat late in manifesting the schizophrenic break that would require his institutionalization, though, reflecting on events, Rosen sees warning signs such as "a mysterious habit of spending whole days in his room with the lights out." Having worked in law and business while budding writer Rosen studied English literature, Laudor decided that he, too, wanted to be an author, leading to encounters with the publishing and film industries that may well have accelerated his final psychotic break, one that culminated in homicide. Rosen captures many worlds in this attentive, nuanced narrative, evoking boyhood discovery, the life of post-Shoah Jews in America, the rise of predatory capitalism, and the essential inability of one friend to comprehend fully the "delicate brain" of the other. It's an undeniably tragic story, but Rosen also probes meaningfully into the nature of mental illness. Throughout, he is keenly sensitive, as when he writes of the perils of self-awareness, "The flip side of the idea that writing heals you, perhaps, was the fear that failing to tell your story, and fulfill your dreams, cast you into outer darkness." An affecting, thoughtfully written portrait of a friendship broken by mental illness and its terrible sequelae. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One The Suitable Playmate When you were a small boy, the aim of the suitable playmate could not have been more perfectly fulfilled: across the street was Michael Laudor, the ideal friend. A brilliant peer. -Cynthia Ozick, letter to the author My family moved to New Rochelle in 1973. There were good schools, green lawns, and quaint signs painted in the 1920s bearing legends like only forty-five minutes from broadway and city of homes, churches and schools, though there were four synagogues and Metro North got you to Manhattan-the rock around which all life revolved-in thirty-three minutes. But the real reason we moved to New Rochelle was so that I could meet Michael. That, at least, is what my mother's best friend, the writer Cynthia Ozick, told me: I heard much of Michael Laudor when you were growing up. And in a way even before you knew of his existence, in this sense: that Michael, or someone like him, was always the goal in choosing where to buy a house. Michael, in other words, was inevitable. I was destined to meet him, or at least someone like him, because friendship cannot actually be foretold any more than madness or the day of your death. Can it? I met Michael soon after we moved in, as I was examining a heap of junk that the previous owners had left in a neat pile at the edge of our lawn. I was looking for relics of the three athletic boys who had lived there, and wondering if a small aquarium was worth salvaging, when a boy with shaggy red-brown hair and large tinted aviator glasses walked over to welcome me to the neighborhood. He was taller even than I was, gawky but with a lilting stride that was oddly purposeful for a kid our age, as if he actually had someplace to go. His habit of launching himself up and forward with every step, gathering height in order to achieve distance, was so distinctive that it earned him the nickname Toes. I didn't learn he was called Toes until fifth grade started, when I learned he was also called Big. The shortest kid in class was called Small, and when they lined us up in height order, Big and Small were bookends. Sensitive teachers sometimes let the short kids go first, which I'm sure did wonders for their self-esteem. Big is less imaginative than Toes, but how many kids get two nicknames? And Michael was big. Not big like Hal, who appeared to be attending fifth grade on the GI bill, but through some subtle combination of height, intelligence, posture, and willpower. In Brookline-the Boston suburb where my family had lived for three years before moving to New Rochelle-I'd been taller than all my friends, but nobody would have called me Big. I settled too easily at the bottom of myself in a shy sediment. Michael was only an inch or two taller than me, and just as skinny, but he seemed to enjoy taking up space, however awkwardly he filled it. Even standing still he had a habit of rocking forward and rising up on the balls of his feet, trying to meet his growth spurt halfway. He stood beside me on Mereland Road in that unsteady but self-assured posture, rising and falling like a wave. He was socially effective the same way he was good at basketball-through uncowed persistence. I often heard in later years that people found him intimidating, but for me it was the opposite. Despite my shyness-or because of it-Michael's self-confidence put me at ease. Perhaps because I was conscious of the awkwardness that he overcame, or simply refused to recognize, I fed off his belief in himself. Besides, being shy is not the same as being modest. The same expectation shaping his life was shaping mine; the belief that your brain is your rocket ship and that simply as a matter of course you are going to climb inside and blast off. Propelled by some mysterious process-never specified, almost mystical and yet entirely real-we would outsoar the shadow of ordinary existence and think our way into stratospheric success. Michael told me his name and my name, too, which he shortened to Jon. He liked to give the answer before the question, and offered his opinion that if the former owners had thrown out the fish tank, it probably leaked even if it didn't look cracked. I've never liked having my name abbreviated but I didn't correct him. It's possible his mother had sent him. Ruth Laudor was a neighborly woman who came over herself at some point to welcome us-and sometimes came over to escape the roar of her own household-but Michael's geniality and supreme self-confidence were his own. Even then, he seemed like the ambassador of his own country. It was Michael who pointed out that while my house was first on the block, it was number 11 not number 1, something I'd never have wondered about because numbers were always unpredictable, even without the "new math" that had been introduced in the sixties so we could win the Cold War. I didn't know it was called new math, only that having been shown a decimal point in fourth grade, I was going to spend the rest of my life trying to figure out where to put it. Michael knew, and played me a song by Tom Lehrer called "New Math," one of many songs and records we spent hours listening to in his living room. The joke of "New Math" was that it was so simple "that only a child can do it," which is to say it was a song for adults, which was part of its special pleasure. Michael never believed in the line separating children from adults, or many other lines either. The Tom Lehrer album was ten years old but new to me, full of names and concepts Michael cheerfully glossed-the Vatican; Wernher von Braun-that gave it an archaic but cutting-edge quality, like the Doc Savage mysteries he also introduced me to. Michael often seemed like someone who had lived a full span already and was just slumming it in childhood, or living backward like Benjamin Button or Merlin. My parents were amused by the speed with which he took to calling them Bob and Norma, and the unabashed way he looked them in the eye as he cursed the bombing of Cambodia or discussed the Watergate scandal while I waited for him to finish so we could play Mille Bornes or go outside. I knew the president was a crook, but Michael knew who Liddy, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman were, and what they had done, matters he expounded as if Deep Throat had whispered to him personally in the schoolyard just behind his house. Theodore Roosevelt Elementary School was so close, Michael told me, I could wake up fifteen minutes before the bell, eat breakfast, and still get to class on time. Michael treated the schoolyard, which had outdoor basketball hoops, like an extension of his backyard. I could see the roof of the school building from the window of my mother's attic office, its ornate cupola suggesting a fancy barn or a village church. I could see Michael's roof from my own window, screened by branches. There were only six or seven houses on the whole street. The Laudors, number 28, were diagonally across and down; a knight's move away on a chessboard. Michael gave me a tour of the Wykagyl shopping center, two blocks from my house, where there was a store called Big Top that sold toys in the back and candy in the front, an A&P, a pizza place, and a pet shop where I could get a new aquarium. Guppies cost ten cents apiece. Michael was the sort of guide who didn't just point out George's Hair Fort, he told you the names of all four Italian brothers who cut hair there. I could only ever remember Rosario, who cut my hair. He cut my father's hair, too, and called out, Professore! when he walked in. He called Michael's father professore too. That was something else we had in common. Our fathers were college professors, though my father taught German literature and Michael's father taught economics. Also, my father was bald on top, with wings of white hair on either side of his head; Michael's father had a dark pompadour combed dramatically back, like the greasers he'd grown up with on the Brooklyn waterfront. The following year, Mr. Summa-who had given up working at the 7-Up bottling plant to become our sixth-grade teacher-started calling Michael "professor" after overhearing him use the word "epiglottis" to tell a joke about hiccups, thus giving him a third nickname. Michael might have been the reason my parents chose Mereland Road, but my mother's friend Cynthia was the reason they'd chosen New Rochelle. Cynthia and my mother were both writers, with an all-consuming devotion to literature, a shared commitment to feminism, and a dark awareness of the Holocaust, the black backing of the mirror they held up to reality that made the reflected world visible. They talked on the phone every day. When they got off the phone, they wrote long letters, and when they received each other's letters, they called, because there could never be too many words, though the written word was the only medium that truly mattered. Cynthia lived in New Rochelle's south end, which had been settled in the seventeenth century by Huguenots-French Protestants fleeing the persecution of Louis XIV. Her house was in walking distance to the train station, the Long Island Sound, and a Victorian house in Sutton Manor that my mother had fallen in love with. But the neighborhood, and my mother's dream house, were "quickly dismissed," Cynthia told me, "because of the absence of any Jewish ambiance." This objection came from my father. "The chief reason was to live in an area where there would be children appropriate for befriending." Appropriate children lived in the north end, where Jews had been settling since the postwar boom. Rob Petrie-the fictional comedy writer played by dapper Dick Van Dyke-lived in a generic suburb called New Rochelle. Carl Reiner-the bald Jew who based The Dick Van Dyke Show on his own life but wasn't allowed to play himself-lived in the north end of New Rochelle. So did Jerry Bock and Joe Stein, the composer and book writer of Fiddler on the Roof, a musical about a poor Jew who dreams about being a rich Jew, which was beloved by rich Jews who dreamed about being poor Jews, or at least remembered their grandparents who'd been poor Jews once themselves. The musical had closed on Broadway only two years before, after becoming a movie. Even my parents had the cast album, though my father considered it a Jewish minstrel show and my mother dismissed it as middlebrow schlock. Jews had moved to New Rochelle to escape New York City, then moved to the north end to escape the troubled parts of New Rochelle, which wasn't a true suburb but a small city in its own right. There were housing projects as well as golf courses, and a once-thriving downtown killed by the departure of a department store whose arrival had also killed it, which was more than I could follow but was the sort of thing they talked about with knowing assurance in Michael's house. The big Conservative synagogue my father wanted us to join, Beth El, had relocated from downtown to the leafier north end and opened its new sanctuary in 1970. Between my mother's dream house in the south and Beth El in the north lay a patchwork of old Irish and Italian working-class neighborhoods, fancy developments, integrated middle-class neighborhoods, a moribund Main Street, and a highway-fractured zone that like the housing projects were largely Black. And so instead of streets with opulent and evocative names like Sutton Manor and Echo Avenue, we moved to Mereland Road. The "mere" in Mereland must once have denoted a body of water, but for my mother the "mere" had devolved into its pedestrian homonym: nothing more. There was no view of the water, only the blind exterior of Beth El looming over North Avenue. Designed by a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, the building was windowless as a power station or a mausoleum but a comfort to my father, who was making peace with the Jewish observance he'd abandoned in retaliation for God's abandonment of his parents thirty years before, when they were murdered along with one out of every three Jews in the world. Our neighborhood was called Wykagyl. The word is believed to be a corruption of an Algonquin name used by the Lenape, though it sounded vaguely Yiddish as pronounced by my father, who had erased a good deal of his accent but who still said his w's like v's. If you never understood why the Marx Brothers thought "viaduct" could be mistaken for "why a duck," then you never heard my father say Wykagyl. Our next-door neighbor, Mr. Fruhling, a refugee from Germany who made me squeeze his eighty-year-old bicep (rock hard, he used dumbbells), also said his w's like v's. So did his tough, tiny sister, who lived in the house with him. So did Harry Gingold, a Holocaust survivor from Poland who lived one street over and gave out the honors at Beth El during Sabbath services, sidling up to congregants and murmuring furtively when it was time to open the ark, as if he were giving a tip on a horse. To my sister and me he was a comic figure, but to my father he was part of the invisible fellowship of refugees it was his soul's secret work to gather up. My father could pinpoint an accent and locate the sorrow behind it the way Sherlock Holmes could spot a limp and account for the accident that caused it at a glance. Once, in a coffee shop, while Michael and I played tabletop soccer with three pennies and sugar packet goalposts, my father divined the wartime history of a waitress-Romania, Paris, the Pyrenees, Spain, Palestine, the Bronx-between the ordering of dessert and the bringing of the check. Even allowing for the brewing of a fresh pot of decaf-my father's one constant demand in life-it was an impressive performance, especially because the information wasn't journalistically extracted but offered in telegraphic exchanges sparked by mutual recognition. As we were leaving, my father murmured, "Her whole family. Auschwitz." Michael was fascinated by such displays, and in his way had a similar impulse. Friends might notice my father had an accent, but Michael asked where he was from and how he'd gotten out of Vienna, and incorporated the information into his way of referring to my father and perhaps me. He incorporated my father's accent, too, which he began imitating almost immediately; not with malice, but more the way you might commit someone's telephone number to memory. Excerpted from The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions by Jonathan Rosen All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
Part I The House On Mereland Road | 1 |
Chapter 1 The Suitable Playmate | 5 |
Chapter 2 The Good Earth | 21 |
Chapter 3 Memory Glass | 40 |
Chapter 4 Strangers | 47 |
Chapter 5 American Pie | 58 |
Chapter 6 Freedom Summer | 74 |
Chapter 7 Message in a Bottle | 90 |
Chapter 8 Misreading | 109 |
Part II The House of Psychiatry | 129 |
Chapter 9 The Shadow Knows | 135 |
Chapter 10 Revolving Door | 142 |
Chapter 11 Going Sane | 155 |
Chapter 12 Stories | 170 |
Chapter 13 Choosing | 184 |
Chapter 14 The Break | 191 |
Chapter 15 Entanglement | 200 |
Chapter 16 Locked Ward | 207 |
Chapter 17 Making Illness a Weapon | 220 |
Chapter 18 Underclass | 228 |
Chapter 19 Halfway | 237 |
Part III The House of Law | 253 |
Chapter 20 Brains | 257 |
Chapter 21 Mentors | 269 |
Chapter 22 Precedent | 280 |
Chapter 23 Secrets | 286 |
Chapter 24 The Sympathetic Light Of Sickness | 299 |
Chapter 25 Happy Idiot | 311 |
Chapter 26 Postdoc | 317 |
Chapter 27 Thoughtful Enabling | 327 |
Chapter 28 Career Killer | 337 |
Part IV The House of Dreams | 343 |
Chapter 29 Role Model | 345 |
Chapter 30 Twice Born | 354 |
Chapter 31 Creativity, Inc. | 364 |
Chapter 32 Michael Called Kevin | 374 |
Chapter 33 Shamans | 382 |
Chapter 34 Equal Opportunity | 394 |
Chapter 35 The Backward Journey | 405 |
Chapter 36 The Two Adams | 416 |
Chapter 37 Personal Emergency | 426 |
Chapter 38 Going Back | 434 |
Chapter 39 The Fatal Funnel | 437 |
Chapter 40 Cain and Abel | 450 |
Chapter 41 The Eternal Optimist | 466 |
Chapter 42 Endings | 474 |
Epilogue No Going Back | 492 |
Acknowledgments | 525 |
A Note on the Sources | 531 |
Index | 541 |