A Calvinist Reads: The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen

It’s rare for me to read a book that’s modern and trending but when I heard an interview with Jonathan Rosen, I was intrigued enough to line up in my library’s queue and wait my turn for The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions (New York: Penguin Press, 2023).

{Warning: this post contains spoilers.]

The Best Minds was worth the wait, but it is not a book that is ultimately satisfying in many ways. It gives us problems but does not give us the solutions. On a societal level, the solutions are not easy and a book like this is just not going to have all the answers, though it does a decent job of painting a picture of the problems. On a more philosophical/theological level, there are answers out there (or rather one Answer) but Rosen is not able to give them to us.

Rosen’s story is non-fiction but it is filtered through his own experiences and perceptions. It is the story of his childhood friend Michael Laudor, a brilliant if cocky boy who seemed destined to conquer the world but was afflicted with schizophrenia and ultimately committed a horrible crime and was sentenced to life in an institution.

For Rosen a lot of the focus is on how this could happen, how our society, through well-intentioned policies enacted in the 1960s and 70s, ends up failing those who have the greatest need. His analysis here is good though ultimately a bit unsatisfying. As is often the case with social programs, there are no easy answers. We went from casting too big a net and sweeping in people who didn’t need institutionalizing and were hurt by that to not casting any net at all and letting those who really did need help forced upon them out to wander the streets in delusion. One would hope that there could be a middle ground. We don’t seem to have found it.

There are a couple of ideas behind the policies that Rosen acknowledges, one good and one bad. On the plus side, a major driving factor behind the move to deinstitutionalization was a respect for the personhood of the individual, even mentally unstable individuals. There was a recognition that we as a society had done things to people — confining them, medicating them against their will and often to a state of catatonia — which violated their rights and their personhood. On the down side, there was a lack of norms, an inability to say what is or isn’t good, what is or isn’t normal, and even ultimately what is reality and what is hallucination. So if the individual chooses to live on the street, naked and covered in lice, the society has no standard by which to say, “no, that isn’t normal and it isn’t good.” And should this individual say that he is a flowerpot that woodchucks are out to get him, there is still no grounds to say this isn’t true. The only standard, the only barrier left is that of violence; only when someone hurts themselves or others can society intervene in any way.

We always struggle with this same basic issue — how to balance the respect for the divine breath in man with the recognition of his fallen, sinful nature. We struggle to be able to say “I value you but I do not accept or approve of everything you say, do, and think.” It is almost trite to say it so we shy away from “love the sinner, hate the sin” but there is still a lot of truth there. And who I am to say what in you is wrong or sinful? We need a standard outside ourselves, outside any human being, that allows us to say both “that is sin” but even “it is not good to live on the street in filth.”

Another concern for Rosen, though one that operates a little more below the surface, is “why him and not me?” In the first part of the book, the dynamic between the two boys feels very familiar. It’s a story that I feel like I have seen in a lot of movies: two males, as close as brothers, alike in many ways but one is the golden child. He outshines all others. Everyone can see his future is bright but, Icarus-like, he flies to close to the sun, or he is cut down by illness or accident, and the remaining boy is left to go on wondering why the one everyone agreed had more potential was taken and he, imperfect being that he is, was left. Rosen gets what both boys wanted — a wife and family and, because both dreamed of being authors, books deals — but with is comes a kind of survivor’s guilt, amplified by a sense of unworthiness.

But the truth is that Rosen is not as unworthy as he seems. Even in their youth there are clues that Laudor is not such a wonderful golden child after all. There is an arrogance and an inability to admit wrong. When Rosen is attacked, Laudor stands back, not only does he not interfere (which might have been dangerous) or run for help, he never admits to his own failings and retells the incident in such a way that his own cowardly part in it is minimized. When the boys compete for a position at the school newspaper, Laudor refuses to be anything but number one. You have to applaud the teacher who seems to be the only one to see that brilliance is not always as important as being able to see others, to compromise and work with them. Rosen, who perhaps today would be diagnosed with some kind of dyslexia, does not do drugs because he feels that his hold on his own faculties is tenuous but Laudor takes what he has been given for granted.

It is a Cain and Abel story, a tale that Laudor himself becomes obsessed with. It is easy to say that Laudor, like Cain, is proud and that as in the biblical story his downfall comes because he fails to appreciate what he has been given. But there is a deeper level as which we can ask why God made each boy as he was. Why is one destined for blessing and the other for a curse? It’s one question that we are never given the answer to.

Though I am not sure Rosen ever uses the word “sin,” he does a wonderful job of describing the far-reaching effects of Laudor’s crime. When Rosen finally snaps and does a horrible thing, he is affected, and of course his victim is, but so are so many others in an ever-widening circle around them. There is a lot of pain and grief to go around. There is also a lot of vicarious guilt, a lot of questioning: “What if I had done…? Could I have prevented this?”

We are given the fall, but, sadly, there is no redemption here. Rosen’s book, in which he himself is a character, ends with pain and with some half-hearted attempts to offer solutions (perhaps we can manage to construct a policy which better helps the mentally ill?) but really with no answers. For the social issues, there are not going to be easy answers because they are not easy questions. But for the stain of this crime — this sin (for it is a sin, even if Laudor was hallucinating at the time) — which has spread like a pool of black ink slowly creeping over so many lives there is ultimately hope. There is no sin so awful that it is beyond divine forgiveness.

I am reminded of the Netflix documentary in Jeffrey Dahmer (which I reviewed here). Dahmer, who makes Laudor’s crimes pale in comparison, learned the lesson when he saw another serial killer repent: If he can be forgiven even for that, then so can I. Laudor himself as the book ends does not seem to have learned this. After his crime, he retreats into himself and never has true clarity again because he cannot face what he has done. He can’t face it because he sees no hope of healing and of redemption.

As one reads The Best Minds it is easy to identify with Rosen. He is the everyman, the imperfectly human character. But ultimately that is not where we need to place ourselves in this story. We are all Laudor. Perhaps we are even more guilty than he is (if one can measure such things) because while most of our misdeeds will not be so headline-grabbing, neither do most of us have the excuse of mental illness. But we need to be able to look and say not “how can some people be like that?” but “the same basic tendencies that are in him and in me.” It is the same fallenness and we, like Laudor, could easily be left in despair. But there is hope because there is forgiveness and redemption. There is One who can wash away all that staining black ink of sin if we trust in His ability and not our own.