Commitment: A novel - Hardcover

Simpson, Mona

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593319273 ISBN 13: 9780593319277

Verlag: Knopf, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

A NEW YORKER AND LOS ANGELES TIMES BEST BOOK 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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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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1.

Walter arranged for a ride up to Berkeley with a girl he barely knew. He promised to bring only his stereo, his albums, and one suitcase. She reminded him that he was moving for the whole rest of his life. He didn’t think so. He was already planning to return.

He had to go to college; he understood that. All his life his mother had spoken of her nursing degree in a reverent tone, sometimes fingering the coin around her neck, proud to be the first person in her family to graduate. But he thought of himself as a slender pin that kept the machinery of his family ticking.

The morning he was leaving forever, according to the girl, his family piled into the Chevrolet and his mom drove to her address. It belonged to a house with a wide, deep lawn in the Palisades, where a woman carried a picnic basket, followed by a compact man in slippers pushing a miniature refrigerator on a dolly. Two middle school boys—one on each side of an ice chest—stumbled out of the front door. The street was high above the ocean, but Walter could see the sharp-cut dark blue waves.

A wood-paneled Ford Country Squire waited in the driveway, with all its doors open.

In an upstairs window, the girl waved extravagantly when Walter stood up out of the car. Susan, her name was. She and Walter had attended four years of high school together. He had never actually thought about her before. He had a faint recollection of her at a table trying to sell him a ticket to a dance.

The red front door hung open to reveal a room with white walls and an old wooden statue. The arrangement was balanced, quiet-feeling, like in a museum. Music trickled out; something with flutes and violins. Vivaldi? Not quite Bach. Walter unloaded his stereo from the trunk.

His sister and brother crouched in the back seat, their heads close together. He wondered for the millionth time what they talked about.

His mom stood out of the car, too. “Thank you for taking Walter,” she called to the other mother.

The other mother took her time to answer, dedicating herself to fitting the small refrigerator into the station wagon. “You’re not driving up? I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”

Her certainty alarmed Walter. Women with that tone intimidated his mom, who abruptly sat back inside the car and stationed her hands at nine o’clock and three o’clock on the steering wheel.

Susan stood in the doorway now, short with short dark hair. This whole family was short and dark-haired. Walter, still holding his stereo, climbed back into the car.

“We can just drive up,” his mother said.

“We don’t have to. It’s fine.”

By then, the small, well-built father had jogged over in his slippers. He had on glasses and would probably have rather been sitting with the paper. But he had a conciliating smile, and Walter’s mom did better with men. She rolled down the window, pushing the hair off her forehead. An hour later, they were driving up Highway 5, following the station wagon, where the compact man was keeping them, he’d promised, in his rearview mirror.

“This is it?” his mom asked, six hours later. She bent close to the steering wheel, inching down Telegraph Avenue. “It’s not what I expected.” Walter could imagine what she expected: doming gold-edged clouds. “It looks a little dumpy.”

Walter saw what she meant. He’d read about hippies in Time and seen them on the evening news—Cronkite talking to a long-haired girl with violet granny glasses—but the people at Indian-print-covered tables on the sidewalk looked old. It had never occurred to him that hippies could be old. Now they passed a park, with shaggy trees looming in the distance.

“Look at him, poor thing,” his mom said, gazing at a man carrying an ancient army backpack. “That’s probably everything he owns.”

Where his mom picked out a homeless pilgrim, Walter noticed a low, beautiful church, half-covered in wisteria. As usual with his mom, he saw it both ways, a kind of double bookkeeping. The station wagon stopped in front of dormitories, where students and parents pushed rough-looking orange wheelbarrows filled with suitcases. Hurrying. No one looked happy. “Do you want to get out?” his mom said.

She wasn’t a confident parallel parker in the best of circumstances. His brother hauled Walter’s suitcase from the trunk, leaving him only the light turntable and box of records. They met Susan in the courtyard, where girls with index card boxes looked up your name and gave you a key. They were both assigned to the seventh floor. Walter hoped her compact father would invite his family to join them for dinner. His mom needed something before the long drive home. Susan’s mother had shamed her into this.

Music leaked from under doors. Gasping at glimpses of gentle true spirit, he runs. Walter had that album. The lifting melody made him a little excited to be here.

Walter’s mom called “Thanks for keeping us in your mirror” down the corridor to Susan’s family, who stood in a cluster with all her luggage. His mom envied wives. Even if she did derive satisfaction from her job, she had a long commute and came home every night tired. She sympathized with husbands and thought that wives had the better deal.

Walter learned, later, that Susan’s mother also worked. She didn’t have the graceful life his mom probably imagined. She turned out to be unhappy, too.

When Walter opened the door, his roommate bolted up in bed, quickly pulling a T‑shirt over his head. He stuck out a hand, saying “Ken,” but didn’t get up, Walter assumed, because of his mother and sister. He probably didn’t have on pants. As Walter looked around the bare room, he stopped at a horn in the corner, mostly hidden by a brown cover but showing one patch of gold.

His family stood uselessly, trapping his new roommate under the covers. Walter wished they would leave; the feeling of these two eras of his life overlapping was unbearable.

Lina went down the hall to find a bathroom and Donnie began to hook up Walter’s stereo.

“Should we all go grab a bite?” his mom asked, trying to be the way a mother should be.

“The cafeteria opens in an hour,” Ken said.

“Walter, come here a minute.” In the hallway, his mom lifted an envelope from her purse. “Put this somewhere safe.” She was watching him, eyes wide in concentration, as he opened the envelope, thick with cash. “It took me a long time to save that.”

Lina returned from the bathroom and whispered, “There were boys in there.”

Donnie was underneath Walter’s bed to plug in the extension cord for the stereo. Then the three of them left. Walter felt winded. He suddenly had an overwhelming desire to sleep.

Twice, Ken got up (he was wearing only boxers and a T‑shirt) and looked out the window. “People in the cafeteria.” Walter could see shapes moving through the glass walls.

“You hungry?” Walter asked.

“Yeah, but I don’t feel like meeting new people. Having to talk.”

He’d said exactly what Walter felt. They stayed in their room.

“Are you Chinese?” Walter asked an hour later.

“Yup. What are you?”

“Me? Nothing.”

“You look like something. Mexican or something. And your name.”

“My dad’s from Afghanistan but I don’t really know him. Now I am hungry,” Walter said, but by then the cafeteria was dark and the hall had quieted.

“I...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593319273
• ISBN 13: 9780593319277
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 416
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar