Critics' Opinion:
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Published Mar 2023
416 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
One of the Most Anticipated Books of 2023—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 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.
"Simpson is an artist of the family saga, the multigenerational narrative ... A kaleidoscopic portrait of a clan of outsiders remaking itself again and again ... Simpson beautifully explores the sacrifices that keep a family together even when it's coming apart."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Deep and tender ... Fans of family chronicles will not be disappointed."
—Publishers Weekly
"Acclaimed novelist Simpson's latest is a vast and multifaceted tale of one family's mutual dedication and loyalty that powerfully demonstrates the importance of community."
—Booklist
"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 powerful family love story propelled by Simpson's profound understanding of people tested by that which could destroy them. Here are three children whose loyalty is divided for years between what might be best for their depressive mother and the paths that could allow them to have meaningful lives. In this beautifully written novel, the constant emotional and financial struggles make their hard-won triumphs, large and small, that much more glorious."
—Amy Hempel, author of Sing to It
"The tale of these three siblings and their troubled mother unfolds with such subtle wisdom, such stately grace, that it's easy to take for granted the artistry of the telling. Mona Simpson offers in small, absorbing increments a family's encounters with hardship and grief, and ambition, avoiding as she does any hackneyed response—rancor, for instance, or indictment—and providing instead, with utter honesty, a paean to the resilience of familial love."
—Alice McDermott, author of The Ninth Hour
"Simpson is a national treasure. Commitment is 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
This information about Commitment was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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