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.
