the best minds book reviews

• ADMIN AREA MY BOOKSHELF MY DASHBOARD MY PROFILE SIGN OUT SIGN IN

THE BEST MINDS

A story of friendship, madness, and the tragedy of good intentions.

by Jonathan Rosen ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2023

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

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.”

Pub Date: April 18, 2023

ISBN: 9781594206573

Page Count: 560

Publisher: Penguin Press

Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PSYCHOLOGY | TRUE CRIME | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

Share your opinion of this book

More by Jonathan Rosen

BOOK REVIEW

edited by Jonathan Rosen & Henry Herz

by Jonathan Rosen

More About This Book

SEEN & HEARD

PERSPECTIVES

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

by Stephanie Johnson & Brandon Stanton illustrated by Henry Sene Yee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 12, 2022

A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.

A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.

Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.

Pub Date: July 12, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

More by Brandon Stanton

by Brandon Stanton

by Brandon Stanton photographed by Brandon Stanton

by Brandon Stanton ; photographed by Brandon Stanton

LOVE, PAMELA

by Pamela Anderson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 31, 2023

A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.

The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.

According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that ." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy , which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.

Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023

ISBN: 9780063226562

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023

• Discover Books Fiction Thriller & Suspense Mystery & Detective Romance Science Fiction & Fantasy Nonfiction Biography & Memoir Teens & Young Adult Children's
• News & Features Bestsellers Book Lists Profiles Perspectives Awards Seen & Heard Book to Screen Kirkus TV videos In the News
• Kirkus Prize Winners & Finalists About the Kirkus Prize Kirkus Prize Judges
• Magazine Current Issue All Issues Manage My Subscription Subscribe
• Writers’ Center Hire a Professional Book Editor Get Your Book Reviewed Advertise Your Book Launch a Pro Connect Author Page Learn About The Book Industry
• More Kirkus Diversity Collections Kirkus Pro Connect My Account/Login
• About Kirkus History Our Team Contest FAQ Press Center Info For Publishers
• Privacy Policy
• Terms & Conditions
• Reprints, Permission & Excerpting Policy

© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Popular in this Genre

Hey there, book lover.

We’re glad you found a book that interests you!

Please select an existing bookshelf

Create a new bookshelf.

We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!

Please sign up to continue.

It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!

Already have an account? Log in.

Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.

Almost there!

• Industry Professional

Welcome Back!

Sign in using your Kirkus account

Contact us: 1-800-316-9361 or email [email protected].

Don’t fret. We’ll find you.

Magazine Subscribers ( How to Find Your Reader Number )

If You’ve Purchased Author Services

Don’t have an account yet? Sign Up.

clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

Michael Laudor was a Yale golden boy. Then a psychotic break led to tragedy.

Nearly 25 years after laudor killed his pregnant fiance, his childhood friend reflects on how things might have gone differently.

From the beginning of Jonathan Rosen’s haunting “story of friendship, madness, and the tragedy of good intentions,” we know how it will end — not only because the story made national headlines , but because the spoiler appears on the book’s jacket. Yet in “ The Best Minds ,” Rosen tells this story with such a keen mix of compassion and eloquence we can’t help but hope there will be a twist that somehow saves everyone from the inevitably heartbreaking outcome.

The story goes like this: In 1973, when Rosen was 10 years old, his family moved to New Rochelle, N.Y., down the street from another 10-year-old named Michael Laudor. Both sons of professors, these Jewish, intellectual, basketball-playing boys became inseparable best friends and academic rivals. While Michael was precociously worldly and charismatically arrogant and Rosen was shy and sheltered, they shared the belief that “your brain is your rocket ship … we would outsoar the shadow of ordinary existence and think our way into stratospheric success.” They attended Yale together, where Michael graduated summa cum laude with a double major in just three years.

Read more from Book World

Although the two had always aspired to be writers, Michael continued his meteoric rise by launching into a lucrative consulting position at Bain & Company with the idea that he would spend 10 years making enough money to quit and write full time. But about a year into his job, Michael began struggling with paranoid delusions that eventually led to his mother locking herself in the bedroom and calling the police as her son stood outside the door with a kitchen knife, insisting she was a surgically altered Nazi who was trying to kill him. Admitted to the neuropsychiatric unit at what was then Columbia Presbyterian, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, a debilitating mental illness for which there is no known cure.

It’s the next part of the story that Rosen grapples with on a personal level and asks us to reckon with as a society as well. Michael was treated with medication, and when he was released to a group home after eight months of hospitalization, his treatment team, believing that a stable, low-stress job would be beneficial, encouraged Michael to apply for a salesclerk position at Macy’s. Instead, he went to Yale Law School, where he “found an adoptive Jewish father behind every classroom door.”

Michael’s classmates assisted with the work he couldn’t manage while he faced the side effects of his medication and his daily delusions, including the recurring belief that his dorm room was on fire. It was in law school, too, that he began dating Carolyn (Carrie) Costello, who would later become Michael’s fiance. After Michael’s graduation, a New York Times article featured him as a shining example of what people with schizophrenia could accomplish. In the piece, Michael spoke about the unjust stigma he faced as a job applicant with a mental health condition, and he dismissed a query about whether he was violent as “a common and painful stereotype.”

The article led to a $2.1 million windfall: a book contract with Scribner and a movie deal with Ron Howard’s Imagine Films, with Brad Pitt attached to star. If Michael had been the brilliant golden boy growing up, now he had become the poster child for the unlimited potential of those with psychiatric illnesses. Yet less than three years later, struggling to write his overdue book and having stopped taking his medication, Michael, in the grip of psychosis, brutally killed Carrie, his pregnant fiance, in their apartment.

“The Best Minds” is Rosen’s masterful attempt to reconcile what happened to Michael, Carrie, and their families and friends, and how — or if — their story might have gone another direction. More than half a century later, Rosen looks squarely at his friendship and the ways in which a culture that reveres intellectual achievement can blind itself to the limitations of that same person’s mind. (“Brilliance was so highly prized in our world that it seemed to guarantee all the other brain functions.”)

He examines the history of how we treat mental illness and how political correctness around naming the real dangers of those affected might inadvertently cause us to neglect their needs. Throughout the book — which is part memoir, part manifesto — Rosen asks uncomfortable but crucial questions, some of them unanswerable, all of them compelling, and the result is an incisive but intimate tour de force that’s as much about Michael’s story as it is about the stories we tell as a culture — what we value, what we see and what we do our best not to see even when it’s right in front of us.

The question looming over the entire narrative, which is interspersed with a fascinating and disturbing history of deinstitutionalization, is how to care for people with mental illness in a way that is safe for both them and society at large. In the name of autonomy, Rosen explains, many patients get care only once a crisis occurs that otherwise might have been averted: “Violence and mental illness have been legally entangled ever since dangerousness, rather than illness, became the necessary prerequisite for hospitalization.”

Rosen deftly moves from this kind of historical analysis to the deeply personal, from sobering to often funny, sometimes in the same paragraph. He tricks us into thinking he’s talking about Michael when he’s really talking about all of us: What are the limits and obligations of friendship? Where is the line between accommodation and harm? Can you separate the behavior from the person, or are they inextricably linked? Nor does he shy away from hard, complicated questions about the quality of life necessary to make life worth living.

The turbulent lives of six brothers with schizophrenia

Rosen seems eager to leave no stone unturned in his exploration, and as a result there are several long sections in this 522-page book that drag the narrative. I would like to have seen those replaced with more transparency around how Rosen feels about Michael now. In his visits at the locked facility where Michael resides, Rosen never asks Michael if he understands that he killed Carrie, and I had to wonder whether he avoided these kinds of tough questions to protect his friend’s psyche or to protect his own. This omission reminded me of something Rosen wrote about their time in college: “We carried the world of each other’s childhood in our pockets like a kryptonite pebble, a fragment of the home planet.”

Up until this point, Rosen is fiercely honest about their complicated relationship. Through early adulthood, Michael isn’t portrayed as a saint or even a good friend at times. Rosen never tries to make Michael anything other than what he is — human — even before his illness struck. Or had his illness always been there? In describing Michael’s quirky personality and unusual behaviors as a child, Rosen wonders, Was this a sign? Was that? He tries to reconstruct it, to find the clues, to imagine there’s a way to wrap our minds around these kinds of tragedies.

Near the end, Rosen points out that our ability to imagine what doesn’t exist separates us from other species and makes us human. “In that regard,” he writes, schizophrenia “is the most human of disorders, a reminder of how remarkable our minds are. It’s like the Tin Man realizing he has a heart because it’s breaking.” What makes “The Best Minds” so affecting is that we can easily imagine a different story for Michael and Carrie, one in which, as Rosen puts it with elegant simplicity, Michael could return to “a time when his brain was his friend and not his enemy.”

Lori Gottlieb is the author of “Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed” and a co-host of the “Dear Therapists” podcast.

The Best Minds

A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

By Jonathan Rosen

Penguin Press. 576 pp. $32

We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

A Memoir About Friendship and Mental Illness

A Q&A with Jonathan Rosen, whose new book, The Best Minds , delves into a fraught friendship and the societal response to schizophrenia

When Michael Laudor killed his pregnant girlfriend, Caroline Costello, in 1998, it was the kind of story the tabloids eat up: a fall from great heights. Laudor had appeared previously in the press, but as a success, celebrated for having graduated from Yale Law School despite a diagnosis of schizophrenia. A movie of his life was even in the works, to be directed by Ron Howard and star Brad Pitt. But after the killing, the New York Post ran a picture of Laudor on its cover with the headline Psycho . Some saw him as the victim of a disease; others refused to accept that his disorder had anything to do with the horror he had wrought.

For the writer Jonathan Rosen, the murder was a nightmare come true. Laudor had been his best friend since the two were 10 years old. They had grown up together, and Rosen always felt like he was in the shadow of the book-devouring, fast-talking boy who managed to finish college in three years. Laudor’s illness had confounded Rosen. It seemed to live alongside his brilliance. And society didn’t know what to do with the fact of it: institutionalize him or integrate him.

Rosen’s new memoir, The Best Minds , is his attempt to understand the complexity of his relationship with Laudor, as well as the ways that mental illness has been treated and understood in America over the past half century. Published earlier this week and adapted for an essay in the May issue of The Atlantic , the book delves into a fraught friendship that even at its brightest moments was tinged with competitiveness, and it also offers—nearly a quarter century after Laudor pleaded insanity and was committed to a psychiatric institution—a deep look at the policies and attitudes that have shaped societal responses to schizophrenia.

I have known Rosen for many years, and over the decade it took him to write The Best Minds , he often shared with me that he was struggling to tell the story. I spoke with him recently about his process, and what he hopes the book might accomplish. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Gal Beckerman: You’ve written novels and nonfiction, and you’ve had a long career as an editor. I’m wondering if this story, the story of you and Michael, was always thrumming in the back of your mind as a part of your life you were eventually going to have to contend with through writing.

Jonathan Rosen: It was always, probably, the encounter I was waiting to have, but I didn’t know what it would be an encounter with. So I didn’t actually know what form it would take. And I didn’t know, when I started writing 10 years ago, how large it would become. And what was strange about it is that the more personal and particular I allowed it to be, the more it seemed to overlap with all of these pieces of psychiatry and law that I hadn’t thought about at all when I thought about the story. It doesn’t mean it turned out that my personal life was somehow emblematic, but it does mean that it was more bound up with these larger forces than I ever recognized.

Beckerman: I imagine it was precisely the very personal side of this that felt the scariest to confront.

Rosen: It’s always a little embarrassing when I explain to people that I came to terms with the fact that this was a story about madness and about someone getting killed, but it was the fact that I had to write about my bar mitzvah or my childhood that really terrified me—just reinhabiting who I was and reinhabiting my relationship to Michael, someone I measured myself against, somebody I competed with. I was competitive with him long after; in retrospect, he was still the hare to my tortoise, but had gone off a cliff long before. And I just kept thinking, I’m going to catch him! And so there were so many levels of confusion or shame, discovering what it means to be smart and why I wanted to be smart and what we thought it would mean. At the same time, when I went back, what was amazing to me was how I wasn’t thinking about any of those things when I was friends with him.

Beckerman: Was it hard to sort of scrape away the retrospect of knowing what later happened to Michael? I imagine the temptation to see him only through the lens of his schizophrenia, to ask if there were hints of what would happen to him even as you’re trying to write authentically about being boyhood friends.

Rosen: That’s a perfect framing of the paradox, to be honest. The most wonderful and generous advice I got from my editor was that I should allow myself to write it novelistically. That doesn’t mean make it a novel, but it allowed me to inhabit the 10 year-old boy I was. The quality that mattered most to me was that what happened was not yet . No one could call it a tragic inevitability. It was still a future that was ahead of us. So even if the atmosphere of the book knows what’s to come, there is still an aspect of the book that doesn’t. And in the end, if you’re trying honestly to embody it, you can’t rely on the theory, ideology, history. It’s just, here I am . And there he was.

Read: American madness

Beckerman: This also seems to be a book about how we understand mental illness, how we frame it, how we pathologize it or romanticize it.

Rosen: I had to un-tell a lot of stories because, in a weird way, this was also a story about stories. People were always filling in the missing pieces of Michael’s story, or they allowed him to narrate his own illness. And psychiatry itself had been taken over, after Freud, by stories. It was applied mythology: You talk yourself into wellness. I think it seemed to people like my parents, who were shaped by that world, and to Michael’s mentors, who were shaped by that world, as if there were a kind of a literary triumph in everyone finally living by the rules of literature. But actually, it’s a disaster if science—which is not a story, but something very different—is governed by the rules, let’s say, of fiction.

Beckerman: It does seem like you come to the conclusion that we make a mistake when we approach the mentally ill not as people who are sick, but rather as a narrative problem, as people whose stories we just need to find a way to integrate.

Rosen: The idea that a story bestows wholeness on you is false. I was raised to be a writer and to believe that the world exists to be put into a book, as I think Stéphane Mallarmé said. I couldn’t have written this book if I hadn’t discovered that I no longer believed that. There’s another paradox for you. The world does not exist to be put into a book. Writing does not make you special or better. And you can tell your own story and still be consumed by it.

Beckerman: That paradox only makes me see how high the bar was for you with this book. If the problem is that we’ve given too much power to storytelling, how much harder it must be to sit down and try to write a book. What kind of mechanisms do you have to put in place to both write authoritatively, but also to check yourself that you’re not becoming intoxicated with that power?

Rosen: And with the conventions of the story. Michael was the first person to tell me about Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces . And the enormous appeal of that story is that the hero starts out, the hero gets lost, the hero gets wounded, the hero gets helped by mysterious forces, the hero emerges stronger than before with gifts to bestow on the world. Well, Campbell actually talked about the schizophrenic journey in a lecture collected in a book called Myths to Live By . He described psychosis as a mythic encounter with mystical benefits. So the expectation—and you see it when The New York Times profiled Michael three years before he killed Carrie; people spoke on his behalf about how he had conquered his illness—was the hero’s journey. Not everything is a story that works that way.

Beckerman: You’re now entering yourself into the public accounting of Michael Laudor. And I wonder how you think about the effect you are going to have.

Rosen: It feels very, very strange. But what I would say is that I could never have even thought about writing this story if it hadn’t been an extraordinarily public story—if Michael hadn’t been written about heroically in The New York Times and literally appeared on the cover of the New York Post under the word Psycho . So in a sense, the most lurid thing had already been told. And yet neither of those versions came close to approximating my own experience, and I couldn’t have written the book if I wasn’t telling a personal story. There’s also the case that Carrie’s story wasn’t told at all. One of the epigraphs in the book is from The Washington Post ; it says, “About the victim less was immediately known.” I was determined not to allow Carrie, who I never met, to disappear. I talked to my old friends and Michael’s old friends and I talked to Carrie’s old friends who poured out such moving, vivid recollections. I would never delude myself into believing that this was somehow my reconstituting her. I’m aware that it could only compound the tragedy if you felt her presence more and understand what it really meant. But it seemed important to me that if I was to tell the story, she would also be present.

Beckerman: Do you still visit Michael?

Beckerman: I guess my curiosity would be how he would respond to this book. If he is in a place mentally where he could digest it.

Rosen: Of course. When I visited him, he didn’t acknowledge that he had killed anyone, so I never pretended that he was participating. And I didn’t interview him, for that reason. In other words, he was still inside of a somewhat delusional understanding of what had happened. I imagine that if he is in the place that he needs to be in order to be released, which is to come to terms with both his illness and the fact that he killed someone, this would be the least of it in a way. But I don’t know if that’s true. I simply don’t.

Beckerman: Your book also manages to present just how complex it is to deal with the problem of mental illness and the ways we are stuck in this pendulum swing of intervention and a kind of hands-off approach. Do you feel like your immersion in the subject has given you any kind of policy prescription?

Rosen: I don’t feel all that confident about policy recommendations. And policies in the aftermath of great devastation, when so many systems were destroyed, are even harder. But if I had to say one thing? Don’t lie. Don’t lie to yourself or to other people about outcomes that you have no way of knowing in advance. Don’t think you’re honoring the autonomy of someone who doesn’t know what’s real and what isn’t, by defending that person as if you were that person and as if they were making a conscious choice. And don’t tell yourself that it is a conscious choice—if they’re ill and can’t care for themselves—to live on the street. Especially because living on the street may well mean living in prison or dying. So at least tell yourself what it is you are defending.

Beckerman: And that goes also, I imagine, for drawing a clear distinction about what mental illness is and what its consequences can be?

Rosen: To redefine mental illness in such a way that it encompasses half the population, to make it a grand fungible state that half of America suffers from, is not to universalize a helpful impulse, but to betray the very people in whose name these policies were originally undertaken. We live in an age of redefinition such that it doesn’t even have to be intentionally Orwellian. But it does, however, make it very hard to help anyone. If everyone is sick, nobody is. There are people too sick to help themselves or even know they’re sick. And that doesn’t consign those who have those illnesses and function wonderfully and have the support or are receptive to it to a hopeless state. But to pretend it doesn’t afflict some in that way is a lie with fatal consequences. It was devastating to see the ease with which experts felt they could expand their area of authority to turn a program for a small percentage of people into a kind of public-health program where everyone can be treated and helped. Everyone deserves help and treatment. But again, you turn the world into a hospital, then what becomes of actual hospitals? They get closed.

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Find anything you save across the site in your account

Briefly Noted

The Best Minds , by Jonathan Rosen (Penguin Press) . This engrossing memoir centers on the author’s childhood friend Michael Laudor, who developed schizophrenia and, in his thirties, committed a horrific murder. The pair, both Jewish faculty brats with literary dreams, grew up on the same street in New York’s suburbs—parallels that haunt Rosen as Laudor’s brilliance edges into paranoia. Rosen thoughtfully interweaves this story with an account of changing attitudes toward mental illness. Laudor, before his crime, had become a poster boy for a Foucault-influenced intellectual culture that saw psychosis as a metaphor for liberation. Meanwhile, as Rosen notes, institutions for treating the mentally ill were being dismantled with no provision of adequate replacements.

We Should Not Be Friends , by Will Schwalbe (Knopf) . When Schwalbe, an unathletic theatre kid who spent his free time at Yale volunteering for an AIDS hotline, met Maxey, a fellow-senior and a celebrated wrestler intent on becoming a Navy SEAL , he never imagined that they’d be compatible. This delicate memoir tracks their intermittent friendship, from initiation into one of Yale’s secret societies to thirty-five-year college reunion. Gradual revelations from parts of Maxey’s life which Schwalbe missed make for an unexpected page-turner that may inspire readers to reach out to old friends. Schwalbe overcomes the perspectival limitations of memoir-writing by allowing himself access to his friend’s thoughts, notably in rhapsodic contemplations of the sea surrounding the Bahamian island where Maxey ultimately finds purpose.

The Best Books of 2023

Read our reviews of the year’s notable new fiction and nonfiction.

Romantic Comedy , by Curtis Sittenfeld (Random House) . Flirting with the tropes of its namesake genre, this playful novel follows Sally, a writer on an “S.N.L.”-like show called “Night Owls,” who falls in love with one of its guest hosts. Their relationship develops via e-mail in the post-grocery-wiping, pre-vaccine days of Covid-19 . When Sally decides to visit her beloved in L.A., their time together in his Topanga mansion requires her to navigate incredulity, insecurity, and an offer that she feels is an “affront to my independence.” The novel is preoccupied with the instinctual nature of self-sabotage, and with the fulfillment that can come from defying ingrained impulses.

Künstlers in Paradise , by Cathleen Schine (Henry Holt) . Julian, a directionless young New Yorker, ventures west, to Venice Beach, to help care for his zesty ninety-three-year-old grandmother. When the pandemic descends, he finds himself sequestered indefinitely with her, as she recounts memories of her Anschluss-ruptured Vienna childhood and her family’s subsequent immigration to Hollywood, where she came to know legends including Arthur Schoenberg and Greta Garbo. The novel emphasizes echoes across history but explores intergenerational gaps, too, and—despite handling such weighty subject matter as survivor’s guilt, sexual repression, and the ongoing traumas of racial and religious persecution—maintains a remarkable lightness of tone and of characterization.

New Yorker Favorites

A Harvard undergrad took her roommate’s life, then her own. She left behind her diary.

Ricky Jay’s magical secrets .

A thirty-one-year-old who still goes on spring break .

How the greatest American actor lost his way .

What should happen when patients reject their diagnosis ?

The reason an Addams Family painting wound up hidden in a university library .

Fiction by Kristen Roupenian: “Cat Person”

Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .

Books & Fiction

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Maggie Doherty

The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen: A heartbreaking memoir about friendship

Rosen dives deep into society’s response to mental illness and how health policy needs reforming to tackle it.

Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor met aged 10. The Best Minds maps their lives together.

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).

Take That in Dublin review: ‘Whose idea was it to have stairs?’ puffs Gary Barlow as the band roll back the years with dazzling show

Baby Reindeer’s Richard Gadd on the true story behind the show: ‘People are afraid to admit they made mistakes’

Nicola Coughlan: ‘My family would have been well within their rights to tell me, this isn’t working out, but they didn’t’

Nuala O’Connor on her adult autism diagnosis: ‘I’d found out it was my brain pushing me in these directions ... I was euphoric’

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.

IN THIS SECTION

Poetry day ireland: being a good sport, that they may face the rising sun: the best irish film in a very long time, you are here by david nicholls: a highly relatable love story of significance, how poetry is helping us preserve our past - and question our assumptions of history, choice by neel mukherjee: novel of important themes hampered by didactic tone, aoife johnston inquest: limerick hospital staff describe being ‘haunted’ by teenager’s death, ‘i’m alone pretty much all the time . . . and the older i am becoming, the less hopeful i am this will change’, more than 80% of asylum applicants now coming from uk via northern ireland, says mcentee, tony felloni, notorious dublin heroin dealer, dies suddenly aged 81, latest stories, baltimore bridge collapse: city claims ship was ‘unseaworthy’, had ‘incompetent crew’, new gambling law set to allow carve out for charities, us senate passes $95bn aid package for ukraine, israel and taiwan, laura kennedy: my heart is broken for want of an elusive spice bag.

• Terms & Conditions
• Privacy Policy
• Cookie Information
• Cookie Settings
• Community Standards

• Biggest New Books
• Non-Fiction
• All Categories
• First Readers Club Daily Giveaway
• How It Works

Get the Book Marks Bulletin

Email address:

• Categories Fiction Fantasy Graphic Novels Historical Horror Literary Literature in Translation Mystery, Crime, & Thriller Poetry Romance Speculative Story Collections Non-Fiction Art Biography Criticism Culture Essays Film & TV Graphic Nonfiction Health History Investigative Journalism Memoir Music Nature Politics Religion Science Social Sciences Sports Technology Travel True Crime

April 23, 2024

• Samanth Subramanian on AI and the end of the human writer
• On the rise of literary travel
• Emily Barr writes about libraries, Encyclopedia Brown , and her brother, Philip Seymour Hoffman

A review of The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen

The Best Minds A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions by Jonathan Rosen Penguin Press April 2023, Hardcover, 576 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1594206573

The outlines of Michael Lauder’s story are dramatic. He whizzed through Yale, graduating summa cum laude and Phi Betta Kappa after three years. A mental “break,” hospitalization, and a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia followed shortly after. Even so, he enrolled at Yale Law School, where professors and students embraced his quirky brilliance. Lauder was profiled in The New York Times and heralded as something of a schizophrenic Wunderkind. Movie producers and book publishers competed for the rights to his life story. But too few people took note when he began to spiral downward. At age thirty-five, in a psychotic rage, Lauder killed his pregnant fiancée with a kitchen knife.

Jonathan Rosen became best friends with Michael Lauder at age ten. His outstanding new book, The Best Minds , offers an assiduously researched and compelling portrait of the man. It also raises questions about the responsibilities of friendship, and the human capacity for denial. Twenty-five years have elapsed since Lauder’s criminal unravelling, a span that has given Rosen space and time not only to research the people and ideas of this story, but to sift through his own complex feelings about Lauder and the path his life took.  

Rosen met Lauder shortly after his family moved onto Mereland Avenue, in the tightly knit, Jewish neighborhood of Wykagyl in New Rochelle, New York. Immediately, Rosen sensed something extraordinary, and extraordinarily appealing, about his new neighbor. “Michael’s geniality and supreme self-confidence were his own. Even then, he seemed like the ambassador of his own country.”   Later in the narrative, a reader can’t help but recall some of the author’s eerily prescient observations.  

For the better part of a decade the two boys were inseparable, and Rosen’s descriptions of their early years together provide some of the book’s most memorable scenes. Here’s a snapshot from elementary school: “Michael kept stacks of paperbacks on his desk, working his way through fresh piles every day. He didn’t just read the books, he read them all at the same time , like Bobby Fischer playing chess with multiple opponents.” Some of the traits Rosen notes in his childhood friend –– arrogance, for example, and self-absorption –– would re-appear, in a less innocent guise, in adulthood.  

Rosen writes that, “Michael and I grew up in a Norman Rockwell painting,” and indeed, both boys were raised by devoted, if sometimes eccentric, parents. Here’s a depiction of their fathers: “The maroon Chevy Malibu rusting in front of my house rhymed with the ancient Plymouth Valiant rusting in front of Michael’s. The Lauders also had a battered Ford station wagon lurking in the driveway like a wood-paneled hearse. Chuck [Lauder] drove it like a Ferrari… always trying to shave a few seconds off his personal best no matter how local the driving. When my father drove us[,]… Michael liked to draw his long legs up, circling his knees with his arms in mock preparation for impact. My father was, in fact, perfectly capable of forgetting he’d put the car in reverse before pulling out of a spot…” The comfortable tone established early in the book in no way prepares the reader for what lies ahead.  

A handful of jarring events, which Rosen relates briefly, hint at a darker future. While the boys were together at “hippie” summer camp,” the mother of Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death while playing the organ at church. The murderer, Rosen writes, was “a model student at Ohio State [who] began exhibiting … strange beliefs and behavior …”.. He mentions the stabbing death of his first-grade teacher. And he tells of the Son of Sam, a serial killer who claimed to have murdered people on the orders of a six-thousand-year-old demon inhabiting the body of a black Labrador.

He also shows how intense competition between the two boys morphed into quiet distrust and mutual estrangement. In high school, each spent months applying to a selective summer program –– “an all-expenses-paid nerd camp,” as Rosen calls it –– without letting the other know. As it turned out, the two would float in and out of the other’s orbit for decades: “We carried the world of each other’s childhood like a kryptonite pebble, a fragment of the home planet.” Even after Lauder, in his mid-twenties, wound up in the locked ward of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, Rosen writes, “I couldn’t help feeling, or fearing, that Michael and I were spookily attached.” Despite increasingly ambivalent feelings toward his old friend, Rosen describes a connection that seemed unbreakable.

Woven through this intensely personal story is an examination of the historic shifts in thinking surrounding mental illness and its treatment. Rosen pays particular attention to the national push for de-institutionalization, and the failed promise of community mental health care that followed. Because he focuses on the people at the center of the debate, what might otherwise be a dry discussion about Medicaid reimbursements, state hospitals and board-and-care homes becomes compelling reading. He tells of Rebecca Smith, a college valedictorian with schizophrenia who, after spending ten years in a mental institution, ran away to New York City and lived in a cardboard box. She froze to death only hours before the court order arrived for her hospitalization.  

For all the book’s attention to the failed mental health system, one could argue that the system itself wasn’t such a central player in Lauder’s story: to an unusual degree, the young man was enveloped in love and support. Rosen writes with compassion about Lauder’s parents: a mother who was devoted to her son but terrified on those occasions when he roamed the house with a knife, deluded in thinking that his parents were in fact Nazis; and a father –– “the booster of all boosters” –– who, when Lauder was in law school, called his son on the phone each morning to coax him through the recurring hallucination that his dorm room was on fire.

Rosen makes much of a loosely affiliated group of family friends, psychiatrists, and social workers –– “The Network,” as they called themselves –– who watched over, advised, and on occasion even housed Lauder. Why, Rosen asks, did none of them intervene when Lauder showed symptoms of decline? Perhaps, he suggests, they were so invested in keeping Lauder out of an institution that “they’d hidden (his disorder) away even from themselves, like the spinning wheel in ‘Sleeping Beauty’.” Perhaps, as well, they were too wrapped up in Lauder’s remarkable successes –– a reflection, of sorts, of their own efforts –– to take note when his symptoms worsened.  

At Yale Law School, Rosen writes, where Lauder arrived “staggered by schizophrenia [and] veiled by medication,” he was revered and cared for by other students: “Classmates who knew nothing of Michael’s illness accounted for his aura of otherness in symbolic ways, ascribing it to some danger he had passed, a mystical temperament or intelligence itself settling palpably around him, like genius visible.” The legal scholar and Judge Guido Calabresi, then-dean of the Yale Law School, “had a genuine belief in Michael’s brilliance, and therefore in Michael himself.” Calabresi went to extraordinary lengths to ensure Lauder felt welcomed and supported –– personally delivering the bed, for example, to Lauder’s dorm room. Following graduation, the school even awarded Lauder a two-year, first-of-its-kind, postdoctoral appointment.  

A few years down the road, it was movie producers and book publishers who gathered round Lauder, excited to tell the story of a man who’d prevailed in his battle with schizophrenia: “When the president of Scribner asked Michael if he still hallucinated, Michael told her, ‘I’m hallucinating right now.’ She asked what he saw, and the room grew quiet as Michael described a burning waterfall emptying into a lake of fire… Bidding (on his life story) began at $200,000 and rose quickly.”  Scenes like this raise the question of whether Lauder was viewed, by some, as something of a curiosity.  

Rosen asks how much Lauder’s admirers, even as they showered him with adulation, turned a blind eye to the dangers of his illness. And he takes himself to task for his own denial of Lauder’s deteriorating condition. Here’s a conversation between the two men a few years after college:  “[W]hen I asked, after a particularly long silence, how he’d been spending his time, [Lauder] said, ‘Oh, thinking of ways to kill myself. Taking larger doses of medication. Lying on my bed in a fetal position.’ What kept me from rushing over on the spot?” Only in hindsight does Rosen realize how he’d refused to see what was right in front of him.  

The book is haunted by the question of how Lauder could slip, unchecked, into a psychotic rage. Certainly, it speaks to the treacherous nature of schizophrenia.   Lauder was wholly devoted to his fiancée, Carrie Costello. After he’d killed her –– using two knives to stab her repeatedly from behind and to cut her throat –– he was unsure whether he’d killed his fiancée, or a windup doll. He travelled 170 miles before flagging down a policewoman to offer a barely coherent confession.  

But Rosen also questions the often-overblown value placed on intellect. Even as a boy, Rosen sensed that “[the] same expectation shaping [Lauder’s] life was shaping mine; the belief that your brain is your rocket ship … we would think our way into stratospheric success.”  Rosen writes with an intuitive understanding of Lauder; others, it appears, may have simply been drawn to Lauder’s dazzling intelligence. Commenting on the The New York Times profile, Rosen notes that “[b]rilliance was the fulcrum of the story, the point at which Michael was lifted above the stereotypes of schizophrenia…”

Perhaps, Rosen suggests, the shine of brilliance blinds us to other problems: “Nobody told us that being smart would make us sane, successful, and maybe immortal; it went without saying. Just as it went without saying that Michael, plucking the strings of his intelligence, would keep The Angel of Madness from carrying him away.”

As boys, both Rosen and Lauder aspired to be writers. Rosen is the author of two novels and two previous works of nonfiction. Lauder, for all his brilliance, was denied admission to a prestigious writing workshop. The walls of his bedroom were papered over in rejection letters from literary magazines where he’d submitted his short stories. And although he’d received a $600,000 advance for his book, he never managed to produce the manuscript. Michael Lauder has spent the past twenty-five years in the Mid-Hudson Forensic Psychiatric Center, fifty-five miles outside of New York City. Adding to a litany of tragedies, Rosen suggests, is the fact that he was never able to tell his own story.  

About the reviewer: Tucker Coombe writes about memoir and nature from Cincinnati, Ohio and Chatham, Massachusetts. Her work has been published in Brevity, The Rumpus, and Los Angeles Review of Books. In her spare time she trains dogs, keeps bees, and gardens with a focus on native plants and wildlife.

Post navigation

• Member Login
• Library Patron Login

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR

FREE NEWSLETTERS

Search: Title Author Article Search String:

The Best Minds : Book summary and reviews of The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen

Summary | Reviews | More Information | More Books

The Best Minds

A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

by Jonathan Rosen

Critics' Opinion:

Readers' rating:

Published Apr 2023 576 pages Genre: Science, Health and the Environment Publication Information

Rate this book

About this book

Book summary.

Acclaimed author Jonathan Rosen's haunting investigation of the forces that led his closest childhood friend, Michael Laudor, from the heights of brilliant promise to the forensic psychiatric hospital where he has lived since killing the woman he loved. A story about friendship, love, and the price of self-delusion, The Best Minds explores the ways in which we understand—and fail to understand—mental illness.

When the Rosens moved to New Rochelle in 1973, Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor became inseparable. Both children of college professors, the boys were best friends and keen competitors, and, when they both got into Yale University, seemed set to join the American meritocratic elite. Michael blazed through college in three years, graduating summa cum laude and landing a top-flight consulting job. But all wasn't as it seemed. One day, Jonathan received the call: Michael had suffered a serious psychotic break and was in the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital. Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, Michael was still in the hospital when he learned he'd been accepted to Yale Law School, and still battling delusions when he decided to trade his halfway house for the top law school in the country. He not only managed to graduate, but after his extraordinary story was featured in The New York Times, sold a memoir for a large sum. Ron Howard bought film rights, completing the dream for Michael and his tirelessly supportive girlfriend Carrie. But then Michael, in the grip of an unshakeable paranoid fantasy, stabbed Carrie to death with a kitchen knife and became a front-page story of an entirely different sort. The Best Minds is Jonathan Rosen's brilliant and heartbreaking account of an American tragedy. It is a story about the bonds of family, friendship, and community; the promise of intellectual achievement; and the lure of utopian solutions. Tender, funny, and harrowing by turns, at times almost unbearably sad, The Best Minds is an extreme version of a story that is tragically familiar to all too many. In the hands of a writer of Jonathan Rosen's gifts and dedication, its significance will echo widely.

• "Beyond the Book" articles
• Free books to read and review (US only)
• Find books by time period, setting & theme
• Read-alike suggestions by book and author
• Book club discussions
• and much more!
• Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
• More about membership!

Media Reviews

Reader reviews.

"Dazzling ... both a breathtaking and tragic portrait of a man with vast potential and a reckoning on how schizophrenia is treated and understood. This is a tough one to forget." — Publisher's Weekly (starred review) "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." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "This book gets you in its grip from the first pages. It is the opposite of a magic trick: nothing is hidden but the revelations are constantly stunning, a testament to Jonathan Rosen's sheer skill as an author. The Best Minds is a heartbreaking story and an astonishing work of art, its tragedy rendered with unbounded humanity and depth." —Stephen J. Dubner, host of Freakonomics Radio "With bracing honesty, Jonathan Rosen tackles one of medicine's greatest mysteries, the origins and outcomes of maladies of the mind. In artful prose and with a compassionate voice, he takes us on a journey from childhood to academia to locked institutions. Not always easy to read but well worth it, The Best Minds is a work of nuance and insight that triggers thought and pulls at the heart." —Jerome Groopman, MD, Recanati Professor Harvard Medical School; author of How Doctors Think ; coauthor of Your Medical Mind (with Dr. Pamela Hartzband) "In this riveting narrative, Jonathan Rosen guides us through his lifelong friendship with Michael Laudor, a young boy of exceptional promise who becomes a young man exceptionally ill with schizophrenia. This cautionary tale reminds us that schizophrenia is a formidable foe. For even the best minds, the illness can be devastating, subverting its own treatment. And for those who love someone afflicted with schizophrenia, our best instincts for compassion and accommodation can lead to dire consequences. But The Best Minds is not only about genius and madness. It is about how all of us approach what we can't understand and how each of must do better for those who can't fend for themselves." —Thomas Insel, MD, former director, National Institute of Mental Health and author of Healing "A moving evocation of childhood friendship that morphs into a devastating evocation of mental illness. Rosen is persistently judicious and precise. The result is a harrowing tour de force." —Peter D. Kramer, author of Death of the Great Man and Listening to Prozac

Author Information

Jonathan rosen.

Jonathan Rosen is the author of two novels: Eve's Apple and Joy Comes in the Morning , and two non-fiction books: The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds and The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature . His essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times , The New Yorker , The Atlantic , The Wall Street Journal , and numerous anthologies. He lives with his family in New York City.

More Author Information

More Recommendations

Readers also browsed . . ..

• Under Alien Skies by Philip Plait
• The Blue Machine by Helen Czerski
• A City on Mars by Kelly Weinersmith, Zach Weinersmith
• The Great Displacement by Jake Bittle
• The Exceptions by Kate Zernike
• The Climate Book by Greta Thunberg
• Rough Sleepers by Tracy Kidder
• The Parrot and the Igloo by David Lipsky
• Move Like Water by Hannah Stowe
• Between Light and Storm by Esther Woolfson

more science, health and the environment...

Support BookBrowse

Join our inner reading circle, go ad-free and get way more!

Find out more

BookBrowse Book Club

Members Recommend

The House on Biscayne Bay by Chanel Cleeton

As death stalks a gothic mansion in Miami, the lives of two women intertwine as the past and present collide.

The Flower Sisters by Michelle Collins Anderson

From the new Fannie Flagg of the Ozarks, a richly-woven story of family, forgiveness, and reinvention.

Win This Book

The Funeral Cryer by Wenyan Lu

Debut novelist Wenyan Lu brings us this witty yet profound story about one woman's midlife reawakening in contemporary rural China.

Solve this clue:

and be entered to win..

Your guide to exceptional           books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

Subscribe to receive some of our best reviews, "beyond the book" articles, book club info and giveaways by email.

Book review: The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen

• Download as Ogg
• Download as MP3
• Download as AAC
• Play Ogg in browser
• Play MP3 in browser
• Play AAC in browser

Photo: Penguin Random House NZ

Jenna Todd of Time Out Bookstore reviews  The Best Minds  by Jonathan Rosen published by Penguin Random House NZ  

To embed this content on your own webpage, cut and paste the following:

<iframe src="https://www.rnz.co.nz/audio/remote-player?id=2018935600" width="100%" frameborder="0" height="62px"></iframe>

See terms of use .

Recent stories from Nine To Noon

• Personal finance: How to get through being made redundant
• The Taranaki gym encouraging older people to lift weights
• Music with Charlotte Ryan: Taite Prize winners + Earth Day
• Around the motu: Mike Tweed in Whanganui
• Natalie Haynes on bringing the classical world to the modern one

Get the RNZ app

for easy access to all your favourite programmes

Subscribe to Nine To Noon

Podcast (MP3) Oggcast (Vorbis)

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

The best recent crime and thrillers – review roundup

The Spy by Ajay Chowdhury; A Beginner’s Guide to Breaking and Entering by Andrew Hunter Murray; The Kitchen by Simone Buchholz; The Innocents by Bridget Walsh; The Grand Illusion by Syd Moore

The Spy by Ajay Chowdhury ( Harvill Secker , £18.99 ) The fourth novel in Chowdhury’s series sees the former Kolkata policeman turned Met officer Kamil Rahman recruited by MI5 to foil a terrorist plot that’s being hatched in an east London mosque. His attempts to win the trust of the plotters take him to the heart of the Kashmir conflict, an appalling hell-brew of nationalism, personal greed, brutality and suffering. Meanwhile, Brick Lane restaurateur Anjoli, his old friend and sometime employer, also finds herself in danger when she helps family friends investigate the kidnap of their teenage son, who manages to convey clues to his whereabouts by messages referencing the Harry Potter books (readers may realise this rather sooner than Anjoli does, but there’s plenty of exciting distraction while waiting for her to cop on). The plot races to a splendidly dramatic ending; Chowdhury’s writing is compelling and compassionate, especially on the themes of displacement, and divided loyalties personal and political.

A Beginner’s Guide to Breaking and Entering by Andrew Hunter Murray ( Hutchinson Heinemann, £18.99 ) Al has found his own solution to the high cost of renting. It’s an unofficial form of house-sitting: breaking, entering and squatting luxury properties while their rich owners are away. Al calls himself an “interloper”, and prides himself on his skill and methodology. However, he is writing his story on a prison computer, so we know, from the off, that things haven’t gone exactly to plan. A series of unexpected developments results in his reluctantly teaming up with three other interlopers, then turning detective when the group become suspects in the murder of one of the house-owners. The hit-and-miss observational comedy could do with a trim, but a propulsive plot, an ingenious narrator and lashings of intrigue make this a genuine and thoroughly enjoyable page-turner.

The Kitchen by Simone Buchholz , translated by Rachel Ward ( Orenda, £9.99 ) The seventh book in award-winning German author Buchholz’s excellent Hamburg-based Chastity Riley series has the public prosecutor investigating a series of neatly parcelled male body parts discovered in the River Elbe. The murdered men, all of whom are known abusers of women, can’t be said to be a great loss to the world, but nevertheless, Chastity must do her job. Meanwhile, her best friend Carla has been raped by two men in the basement of the cafe she owns, and the police are showing very little enthusiasm for tracking down the perpetrators. At what point does one decide that enough is enough and take matters into one’s own hands? Beautifully concise, with commendably sparse prose, dark humour and an appealing protagonist, this in an uncompromising, provocative and righteously fierce examination of the ways in which law and society repeatedly fail 50% of the population.

The Innocents by Bridget Walsh ( Gallic , £12.99 ) Like its predecessor, The Tumbling Girl , which introduced writer-turned-investigator Minnie Ward and her partner in crime-solving, former policeman Albert Easterbrook, Walsh’s second novel is set in late 19th-century London theatreland. Albert continues to solve crime, while Minnie has turned her attention to saving the financially beleaguered Variety Palace music hall. But then the proprietor’s pet monkey goes missing, and a series of apparently unconnected deaths turn out to be linked to a tragedy 14 years earlier, when an audience stampede during a pantomime resulted in the suffocation of 183 children. Walsh, who clearly knows her Victorians, writes with gusto. Whether she’s detailing the sweat, greasepaint and trickery behind theatrical illusion, the bloody savagery of the dog-fighting pit, or the creepily anthropomorphic world of the taxidermy diorama, time past is so vividly evoked that one can almost smell it. Highly recommended.

The Grand Illusion by Syd Moore (Magpie, £16.99) There’s more sleight of hand and derring-do on show in Syd Moore’s latest, which is set in the summer of 1940, when Britain was preparing to repel the Nazi invading force. It’s based, at least in part, on real events. Magician’s assistant Daphne Devine and her boss Jonty Trevelyan, AKA the Grand Mystique, are co-opted by MI5 to work with a group drawn from the worlds of theatre, fashion, zoology and the circus. Their brief is to exploit the German High Command’s belief in the occult by creating a plausible and spectacular magic ritual, which will be reported back to Hitler as proof that Britain is able to harness supernatural forces. Although the wandering point of view is slightly disconcerting, this is a well-researched, vivid and thoroughly entertaining Girl’s Own adventure, with a brave and resourceful heroine who acquits herself well against both the enemy and the endless macro-aggressions from entitled men on her own side. More, please.

• Crime fiction
• Crime and thrillers roundup

Most viewed

Emily Henry does it again. Romantic 'Funny Story' satisfies without tripping over tropes

Purchases you make through our links may earn us and our publishing partners a commission.

The weather is getting warmer, so obviously it's time for another banger read from Emily Henry.

For a subset of millennial women, the author has become a summer staple . Freewheeling romances that defy the stereotypes of "beach reads" (starting with her 2020 debut cheekily titled, "Beach Read"), Henry has become a reliable source of yearly can't-put-them-down stories about love, friendships and getting older.

Her latest, " Funny Story " (available now from Berkley Hardcover, pp. 410) takes the traditional "opposites attract" narrative and gives a realistic, if somewhat tragic twist. Children’s librarian Daphne Vincent (Henry’s characters always love to read) has moved to a idyllic Lake Michigan beach town with her fiancé Peter, slotting herself into his preferred life and the house he bought.

• "Funny Story" at Amazon for $19
• "Funny Story" at Bookshop.org for $27

Check out: USA TODAY's weekly Best-selling Booklist

But when Peter leaves her for his childhood best friend just weeks before their wedding, Daphne doesn’t have a place to live. She winds up bunking with Miles, the ex-boyfriend of Peter’s new love. He's a punky, fun-loving charmer who everybody loves, and she's bookish and reserved. They don’t have anything in common except their shared heartbreak, but isn’t that just the perfect setting for new romance? 

It certainly checks a lot of rom-com set up boxes, but Henry wisely keeps Daphne’s journey far from perfect. There is real grief and trauma here, plus a loss of self and identity. Before Daphne can even think about falling in love with Miles, she has to start loving and knowing herself again. Maybe that’s not the stuff of traditional beach fluff, but for so many women who have been lost in romance in an unhealthy way, it’s deeply cathartic. And once the time for romance is right, Henry doesn't disappoint. It's sweet, passionate, and just hot enough to steam up the book, if not set it on fire.

Just like in her other novels, the author's characters are deep, realistic and relatable. Daphne is quiet and guarded, having grown up with an absentee father she has no faith in anyone to live up to her expectations. Gregarious Miles has more issues than meet the eye, and unfolding his inner life takes the reader on an unexpected journey as he and Daphne become friends, and something more.

Henry is so particularly talented at creating romance that eschews tropes and clichés but still satisfies our innate desire for predictability and happy endings in this genre. It's certainly not easy to balance the comfortingly formulaic with the tantalizingly unique. " Story " might hit the mark best of all of Henry's books so far.

It's a funny story, how she does it, actually. You should take a read.

Advertisement

Supported by

For Caleb Carr, Salvation Arrived on Little Cat’s Feet

As he struggled with writing and illness, the “Alienist” author found comfort in the feline companions he recalls in a new memoir, “My Beloved Monster.”

• Share full article

By Alexandra Jacobs

• Barnes and Noble
• Books-A-Million

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

MY BELOVED MONSTER: Masha, the Half-Wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me, by Caleb Carr

J. Alfred Prufrock measured his life out in coffee spoons . Caleb Carr has done so in cats.

Carr is best known for his 1994 best-selling novel “ The Alienist ,” about the search for a serial killer of boy prostitutes, and his work as a military historian. You have to prod the old brain folds a little more to remember that he is the middle son of Lucien Carr , the Beat Generation figure convicted of manslaughter as a 19-year-old Columbia student after stabbing his infatuated former Boy Scout leader and rolling the body into the Hudson.

This crime is only fleetingly alluded to in “My Beloved Monster,” which tracks Carr’s intimate relationship with a blond Siberian feline he names Masha — but his father haunts the book, as fathers will, more sinisterly than most.

After a short prison term, Lucien went on to become a respectable longtime editor for United Press International. He was a drunk — no surprise there, with famous dissolute-author pals like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg hanging around the house. But that he regularly beat Caleb and threw him down flights of stairs, causing not just psychological but physical injuries that persist into adult life, adds further dark shadings to this particular chapter of literary history.

In a boyhood marred by abuse, neglect and the upheaval of his parents’ divorce, cats were there to comfort and commune with Caleb. Indeed, he long believed he was one in a previous life, “ imperfectly or incompletely reincarnated ” as human, he writes.

Before you summon Shirley MacLaine to convene 2024’s weirdest author panel, consider the new ground “My Beloved Monster” breaks just by existing. Even leaving aside the countless novels about them, dogs have long been thought valid subjects for book-length treatment, from Virginia Woolf’s “ Flush ,” about Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel, to John Grogan’s “ Marley and Me .” Meow-moirs are thinner on the ground.

It’s taken a younger generation of feminists, and probably the boredom and anxiety of quarantine, to destigmatize (and in some cases monetize ) being owned by a cat. Male cat fanciers, however, have long been stereotyped as epicene or eccentric, though their number has included such national pillars of machismo as Ernest Hemingway and Marlon Brando . When one male lawyer accidentally showed up to a civil forfeiture hearing behind a kitten filter on Zoom in 2021, America went wild with the incongruity.

Carr, though he’s a big one for research, doesn’t waste much time, as I just have, throat-clearing about cats’ perch in the culture. He’s suffered from one painful illness after another — neuropathy, pancreatitis, peritonitis, Covid or something Covid-like, cancer; and endured multiple treatments and surgeries, some “botched” — and his writing has the forthrightness and gravity of someone who wants to maximize his remaining time on Earth.

He capitalizes not only Earth, but the Sun, the Moon and the roles played by various important anonymous humans in his life, which gives his story a sometimes ponderous mythic tone: there’s the Mentor, the Lady Vet (a homage to Preston Sturges’ “The Lady Eve”; Carr is a classic movie buff), the Spinal Guru and so forth.

Names are reserved for a succession of cats, who have seemingly been as important to Carr as lovers or human friends, if not more so. (At least one ex felt shortchanged by comparison.) Masha is his spirit animal, a feminine counterpart better than any you could find in the old New York Review of Books personals . She eats, he notes admiringly, “like a barbarian queen”; she enjoys the music of Mahler, Sibelius, Rachmaninoff and Wagner (“nothing — and I’ll include catnip in this statement,” he writes, “made her as visibly overjoyed as the Prelude from ‘Das Rheingold’”); she has a really great set of whiskers.

Before Masha there was Suki, blond as well, but a bewitching emerald-eyed shorthair who chomped delicately around rodents’ organs and disappeared one night. Suki was preceded by Echo, a part-Abyssinian with an adorable-sounding penchant for sticking his head in Carr’s shirtfront pocket. Echo was preceded by Chimene, a tabby-splotched white tomcat the adolescent Caleb nurses miraculously through distemper. Chimene was preceded by Ching-ling, whose third litter of kittens suffer a deeply upsetting fate. And before Ching-ling there was Zorro, a white-socked “superlative mouser” who once stole an entire roast chicken from the top of the Carr family’s refrigerator.

To put it mildly, “My Beloved Monster” is no Fancy Feast commercial. All of the cats in it, city and country — Carr has lived in both, though the action is centered at his house on a foothill of Misery Mountain in Rensselaer County, N.Y— are semi-feral creatures themselves at constant risk of gruesome predation. Masha, rescued from a shelter, had also been likely abused, at the very least abandoned in a locked apartment, and Carr is immediately, keenly attuned to her need for wandering free.

This, of course, will put her at risk. The tension between keeping her safe and allowing her to roam, out there with bears, coyotes and fearsome-sounding creatures called fisher weasels, is the central vein of “My Beloved Monster,” and the foreboding is as thick as her triple-layered fur coat. More so when you learn Carr keeps a hunting rifle by one of his easy chairs.

But the book is also about Carr’s devotion to a line of work he likens to “professional gambling.” Despite his best sellers, Hollywood commissions and conscious decision not to have children to stop the “cycle of abuse,” Carr has faced money troubles. The I.R.S. comes to tape a placard to his door and he’s forced to sell vintage guitars to afford Masha’s medications, for she has begun in eerie parallel to develop ailments of her own.

“My Beloved Monster’ is a loving and lovely, lay-it-all-on-the-line explication of one man’s fierce attachment. If you love cats and feel slightly sheepish about it, it’s a sturdy defense weapon. If you hate them, well, there’s no hope for you.

MY BELOVED MONSTER : Masha, the Half-Wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me | By Caleb Carr | Little, Brown | 352 pp. | $32

Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010. More about Alexandra Jacobs

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

Salman Rushdie’s new memoir, “Knife,” addresses the attack that maimed him  in 2022, and pays tribute to his wife who saw him through .

Recent books by Allen Bratton, Daniel Lefferts and Garrard Conley depict gay Christian characters not usually seen in queer literature.

What can fiction tell us about the apocalypse? The writer Ayana Mathis finds unexpected hope in novels of crisis by Ling Ma, Jenny Offill and Jesmyn Ward .

At 28, the poet Tayi Tibble has been hailed as the funny, fresh and immensely skilled voice of a generation in Māori writing .

Amid a surge in book bans, the most challenged books in the United States in 2023 continued to focus on the experiences of L.G.B.T.Q. people or explore themes of race.

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .