The three Aziz siblings, who center Mona Simpson’s seventh novel, Commitment, are effectively orphans. Their mother, Diane, has fallen into a rapid mental decline since her oldest son, Walter, left Los Angeles to attend UC Berkeley. It’s 1973, and Diane’s diagnosis is vague, although serious enough that she’s been committed to the state hospital in Norwalk. Diane has promised that her son’s education will be paid for by her estranged husband’s family. But the funds aren’t forthcoming. In a flash, Walter is both at the locus of America’s counterculture zeitgeist and a world apart from it.
“The last thing he needed was to get high,” he thinks as a joint circulates around a dorm room. “That was for kids who had nets.”
Back in Southern California, Lina, the middle child, must navigate her senior year of high school knowing that a clear path to college has been closed. The youngest, Donnie, comes of age as a friend and former colleague of Diane’s steps in to handle basic duties. Walter and Lina are secure enough to keep up appearances, but Simpson deftly captures the desperation grinding inside them; they’re still children, clinging to childlike notions of rescue and salvation. When a friend says that her father has argued a case before the Supreme Court, “Lina had an impulse to ask if he would pay for her college.” After Walter meets Diane’s doctor, he thinks, “Maybe she and the doctor would fall in love. That would be a good end to her story.”
Simpson is among a thinning breed of novelists who have used the families of late boomers/early Xers to explore the American condition. Her 1986 debut, Anywhere but Here, set the template for this sort of contemporary domestic epic: a critique of suburbia (or, perhaps more accurately, of middle-class aspiration) that pinpoints its telling details, calls out its hypocrisies, and fractures its narration.
In the years since, Simpson’s affinity for this style of story—to a substantial degree autobiographical—hasn’t waned. Nor has her skill at exploring it in various modes. In Off Keck Road (2000), she studies class and place via cross section, following the lives of three women in a small midwestern town. My Hollywood, published in 2010, explores a similar dynamic from the perspective of domestic workers, while her 2014 novel, Casebook, frames it as a domestic detective yarn. Simpson has always claimed the nuclear family as her turf. But to the extent that she has found different ways to depict its blast and fallout, her career has been remarkably rangy.
In the case of Commitment, Simpson wants to drill into the inner fears of each sibling to show how they scramble to satisfy a craving for the stable home they’ve been denied. Walter enters Berkeley as a premed, but the urgent need to make tuition leads him to refurbish bikes. This reveals a head for business, while his trips to see his mother in Norwalk leave him thinking about institutions and how they are built. “None of the design classes Walter had taken at Berkeley talked about asylums or orphanages or prisons,” Simpson observes. “But they all had to be built. Maybe if they were designed better, they would work the way their founders hoped.”
Lina, for her part, heads to art school in New York, but she, too, is never far from Norwalk. Her art is inspired by clothing and the flowers in Diane’s room. One piece is a dress forged out of iron, reminiscent of a suit of armor.
Donnie’s relative absence through much of Commitment’s first half may initially seem like an error on Simpson’s part. But the neglect on the page, it becomes clear, evokes the neglect he’s experienced in the family. The consequences, when they arrive, commandeer the narrative, much as they would in life. Without giving away too much, Donnie is on a search for home, too, as Walter is with real estate and Lina is with art. Donnie’s crisis, however, more closely echoes his mother’s own.
The symbols Simpson plays with here—buildings, iron dresses—aren’t subtle. But the questions she explores throughout Commitment are nuanced. How much are we in control of our own stories? How much of our lives do we spend chasing the security we think we knew as children, and how futile is that effort? Simpson suggests that family is always a compelling force. Sometimes we claim the story for ourselves, to justify our decisions, as do the shifting narrators in Anywhere but Here. In Commitment, writing in the third person, Simpson means to show how we’re more passively influenced by a collective narrative, how much our lives are, by turns, conscious and unconscious attempts to seal familial fractures.
In the end, of course, we can’t succeed at that—Simpson’s novels are a testament to this impossibility. Commitment is no exception. As the novel moves into the 1980s, the siblings experience various degrees of disillusionment. Walter’s dream of improving American institutions makes him wealthy even as he falls short of his ambition: “Prisons were the future of California,” he laments, “the only institutions opening rather than closing.” Precarity is Lina’s fate as an artist and Donnie’s as a human being. They are, after all, the children of a mother in “a run-down never-built-right hospital compound in Norwalk, California.” Which means they are just like us, seeking ways to understand, if not quite repair, our never-built-right upbringings.•
Mark Athitakis is the author of The New Midwest (Belt Publishing), a critical study of contemporary fiction set in the region. He lives in Arizona.
