THE BEST MINDS

An account of a brilliant young man brought down by schizophrenia, with lives shattered all around him.

The subject of Rosen’s book, Michael Laudor, had a capacious and wide-ranging mind, taking in higher learning and popular culture alike. “Michael and I grew up in a Norman Rockwell painting,” writes the author. In fact, Rockwell lived in and set paintings in their town, a suburban idyll. Laudor and Rosen excelled while living out a late baby boomer existence in academic homes among Holocaust survivors, yet with ominous shadows on the horizon. As Rosen writes, “the culture had prepared us for David Berkowitz,” the poster child for mental illness presented as satanic evil. Laudor was somewhat late in manifesting the schizophrenic break that would require his institutionalization, though, reflecting on events, Rosen sees warning signs such as “a mysterious habit of spending whole days in his room with the lights out.” Having worked in law and business while budding writer Rosen studied English literature, Laudor decided that he, too, wanted to be an author, leading to encounters with the publishing and film industries that may well have accelerated his final psychotic break, one that culminated in homicide. Rosen captures many worlds in this attentive, nuanced narrative, evoking boyhood discovery, the life of post-Shoah Jews in America, the rise of predatory capitalism, and the essential inability of one friend to comprehend fully the “delicate brain” of the other. It’s an undeniably tragic story, but Rosen also probes meaningfully into the nature of mental illness. Throughout, he is keenly sensitive, as when he writes of the perils of self-awareness, “The flip side of the idea that writing heals you, perhaps, was the fear that failing to tell your story, and fulfill your dreams, cast you into outer darkness.”

An affecting, thoughtfully written portrait of a friendship broken by mental illness and its terrible sequelae.