Jonathan Rosen’s considered, compassionate and consuming memoir focuses on his brilliant best friend from childhood, Michael Laudor. The Best Minds maps their lives together: from meeting aged 10, to a heady journey through adolescence and academic achievement, followed by Laudor’s psychotic breakdown, and his against-the-odds success story following his schizophrenia diagnosis, that gradually descended into murder and incarceration. The best minds can break. (Rosen takes his title from Howl by Allen Ginsberg, a frequent touchstone for the author: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness …”)
From comfortable, bookish, eccentric, Jewish New York backgrounds, Rosen and Laudor dreamed of careers as writers, as Ivy Leaguers. Both attended and graduated from Yale University, with Laudor summa cum laude in three years (Rosen says Laudor was always the hare to his tortoise). Rivalry always underpinned the relationship, though, with Laudor usually on top, eventually leading to a fissure in the friendship.
Rosen went to Berkeley to work on an English PhD, while Laudor joined a high-powered management consultancy in Boston to make money fast in order to settle down to write fiction. Rejection followed his efforts, however, and after a period of second-hand contact, Rosen next heard of Laudor in a psychiatric hospital. Increasing paranoia about being followed by shadowy figures and of his parents having been replaced by surgically replicated Nazis culminated in Laudor arming himself with a knife at home.
And yet while in hospital he was accepted into Yale Law School, going on to graduate. A glowing profile in the New York Times soon appeared, followed by Laudor selling his memoir and film rights for more than $2 million. The surface of success did not hold, though, when in the grip of psychosis, Laudor carried out a gruesome murder (I leave details for the book’s telling).
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In The Best Minds, friendship is a fulcrum allowing the author to dive deeply into society’s response to mental illness, into how health policy needs reforming to tackle it. Rosen interlaces ideas and research on medicine, philosophy, therapy, culture, etc into his personal narrative, and also questions the prestige we place on intellectual and material achievement which can cloud judgment when someone needs help. The best minds can be wrong, too. With sensitivity, Rosen weighs both the head and the heart here, writing in a perfect pitch for such a heartbreaking tale.
