I did not enjoy this book.
In The Best Minds, Jonathan Rosen recounts the tragic story of Michael Laudor, his brilliant childhood friend who battled schizophrenia and ultimately ended up in a mental institution after killing his girlfriend. Rosen uses Michael’s life as a narrative vehicle to explore the evolution of psychiatry and psychology in America. While the premise is compelling, the execution was poor.
Despite the widespread acclaim this book has received from journalistic and literary circles, I found it exploitative and desperately in need of an editor. There is simply no reason this book needs to be over 500 pages long. Frankly, I’m not convinced it needed to be a book at all. A well-written magazine profile could have sufficed. Instead, we’re given a bloated, repetitive tome riddled with tangents and a deluge of generic pop culture references so clumsy and overused that I rolled my eyes multiple times. Rosen’s depiction of growing up in the 1960s and ’70s reads less like lived experience and more like an AI-generated cliché.
Worse than the style, however, is overall feeling I got reading this book. While the book’s marketing would have you believe this is a uniquely personal tale of friendship that can only be told by someone who truly knew and loved Michael, what it does not tell you is that Rosen and Laudor really weren’t friends in any meaningful way during their adult lives, and that they butted heads and had a jealous relationship even as teenagers. While they certainly kept in touch and ran into each other, there is nothing intimate or compelling about their relationship. I actually chuckled when Rosen admits that upon both he and Michael graduating high school and getting accepted at Yale, Michael told him, “he did not think we would see much of each other at Yale.” This may be ungenerous, but this book felt like Rosen exploited his history with Michael just to get the scoop and insert himself into the story of someone far more interesting. If I ever wrote something like this about a friend, I think I would deserve to be put in the ward, not have Pulitzer Prize nominations dangled in front of me.
The only redeeming aspect of this book is Michael’s tragic life itself, and the unsettling realities of severe mental illness it exposes. But if that’s what you’re hoping to explore, I’d recommend John Grisham’s The Innocent Man instead.
The Once and Future Lit 