‘The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions’
By Jonathan Rosen
Penguin Press, 576 Pages

Jonathan Rosen’s “The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions” takes its title from Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” and could end up as just as enduring a work of American writing. Expect to see it on “Best Of” lists, and plan to make space for its nearly 600 pages on your shelf. A memoir, a love letter, and a biblical tragedy all at once, it avoids easy answers but clings to difficult questions. A tale told with humility, it charts the path to hell by noting every good intention along the way. 

The book’s spine is a friendship — that word seems both too small and too large for the relationship — between Mr. Rosen and Michael Laudor. They grew up in the same New Rochelle hamlet shadowed by the Holocaust but sunlit by America’s postwar promises to the smart and ambitious. Their fathers were characters who could have been written by Saul Bellow, street-smart scholars and angsty academics. This is the golden age of Jewish America.

Mr. Laudor ascends to New Haven from New Rochelle, and then to Bain Capital, and then the wheels come off, in the form of a florid schizophrenia. Mr. Laudor nevertheless makes it to Yale Law School, buoyed and protected by professors taken by both his brilliance and his brokenness. His persistence is lauded in the New York Times. Leonardo DiCaprio, and then Brad Pitt, contemplate playing him in a movie. Millions of dollars are on the table. 

That Times profile describes Mr. Laudor as “by all accounts a genius” and a “schizophrenic who emerged from eight months in a psychiatric unit at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center to go to Yale Law School.” The school’s dean, Guido Calabresi, reflected that Mr. Laudor is a “brilliant young person who has conquered what is always difficult — an illness — but has conquered it extraordinarily well.”     

Then it all goes wrong. In the grip of delusion, Mr. Laudor murders his pregnant fiance, Caroline Costello, in their kitchen at Hastings-on-Hudson, and goes on the lam before being captured on the campus of Cornell University. Prosecutors accepted his plea of “not responsible by means of mental defect” because they conceded that no jury would convict him of murder. He is to this day at the Mid-Hudson Forensic Psychiatric Center.

“The Best Minds” is a reckoning with this path, and begins with Mr. Laudor’s promise. Mr. Rosen writes that “Michael, in other words, was inevitable. I was destined to meet him, or at least someone like him, because friendship cannot actually be foretold any more than madness or the day of your death.” Everything comes easier for Mr. Laudor; his gifts are oversized. He is what they in the old country called an illui.    

Messrs. Rosen and Laudor’s paths are intertwined from the beginning. They do the same summer program at Telluride, work for the school paper, and end up at Columbia, that secular yeshiva for Jewish boys aspiring to the life of the mind. They both aspire to be writers and battle frustration and stalled ambition on that head. They are high-flying worriers. 

First there is a spell at Columbia’s psychiatric ward, spurred by hallucination and paranoia. Mr. Laudor’s schizophrenia emerges when the disease itself would be “reimagined as a mind-manifesting condition in the coming decade, a psychedelic rather than a psychiatric disorder and even a form of enlightenment” and “an intellectual revolution inspired by a thought disorder.” Mr. Laudor’s broken mind was no metaphor, though. 

Mr. Rosen is adept at catching the jagged frequencies of mental illness, as when he notes that “Michael had always been dazzlingly logical and he still almost was, except that his formidable intellect was in the employ of an irrational idea.” He had, his friend notes, “gotten sick amid the ruins of a demolished system.” Michael is like “someone using beautiful penmanship to write gibberish and deciding that anyone who couldn’t read it must be illiterate.”       

Mr. Rosen describes the harrowing effect of seeing Mr. Laudor’s mind come unfastened and his sanity crack and buckle. Obsessions and hallucinations, bouts of bracing clarity, and stretches of cognitive capsizing are all described with empathy but never euphemism. The book zooms out to tell a story of the flight from institutionalization, none the less catastrophic for being well-intentioned. Mr. Laudor is not a symbol, but he is a symptom. 

“The Best Minds” charts how everything from the counterculture to post-structural theory of the kind espoused by Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault to the legacy of Kennedy-era liberalism conspired to shift the paradigm on madness. The asylum was out, confinement was barbaric, and the crazy ones had it right all along. Mr. Rosen calls the resulting void — filled only with “checks and pills” — a “mental healthcare system that had never been baked.” 

This is a book about the long 1960s. Mr. Rosen notes that “Woodstock was already part of the mythic past” and that “the distance between 1969 and 1973 was unbridgeable.” Nevertheless, “the idealism of the sixties lived in our classrooms” and “our teachers were the products and protectors of its dreams.” Mr. Rosen talks about “sailing into the late twentieth century” on the narrow bed of a college girlfriend.

Mr. Rosen observes that even by the end of the 1970s, “our conventional world was still green, however watered with subterranean streams of music, conspiracy theory, and our dreams of radical liberation.” He quotes Pete Hamill’s description of the doctors and nurses attending the slain Robert Kennedy: “Behind them, in a refrigerator, lay the sixties.” Mr. Rosen adds his own postscript; “oddly, the sixties had also pulled the trigger.” 

“The Best Minds” is full of gem-like observations. Derrida’s “arrival made sober graduate students tremble like teenage girls waiting for Ed Sullivan to introduce the Beatles in 1964.” Another literary titan, Harold Bloom, is meant to debate Cynthia Ozick, but after seeing her speech, he “begged for mercy in advance, telling her he had a sick child.” The writer Norman Mailer looked “shorter, angrier, and more like David Ben-Gurion than I expected.”

Mr. Rosen describes the regime — “community transformation” — as “predicated on the promise of cures that did not exist, preventions that remained elusive, and treatments that only worked for those who were able to comply.” He notes how in 1975 New York adopted a law “which made it all but impossible to require treatment for people suffering severe mental illness, no matter how terrified and disorganized their life on the street became.”

“The Best Minds” holds steady, even when its focused is trained on the vertiginous. When sick, Mr. Laudor’s eyesight “no longer allowed him to read a page at a glance. His photographic memory was itself just a memory; the literary passages he recited were placeholders for a vast forgotten library, reminding him of all that would not come when called.” Mr. Laudor “spoke from the inside of the dragon and gave his listeners a glimpse of authentic fire.”

“The Best Minds” ends with Mr. Rosen visiting his old friend, now out of the world for close to a quarter century, a permanent resident of a hidden continent of the unwell. Mr. Laudor believes himself to be a Mossad agent, and worries that the woman he murdered was an initiate of Opus Dei. Mr. Rosen relates that hugging Mr. Laudor goodbye was “like putting my head in the mouth of an old and toothless lion, softened by age but still capable of crushing me.”