Review: A friend descends into violence, madness in riveting 'Best Minds'

Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor grew up best friends in New Rochelle, N.Y. Bookish and Jewish, they had a lot in common. But Laudor, Rosen tells us in his excruciating, riveting memoir "The Best Minds," excelled in every way — quicker, smarter, more charming.

Both men went to Yale, but Michael blasted through in three years. He'd always had quirks — staying up all night, imagining bizarre things in the fiction he attempted to write — but hey, brilliant people are simply more intense than the rest of us, right?

In his mid-20s, Michael's quirks became more serious. He grew delusional, hallucinating that his bed was on fire, his parents had been replaced by murderous Nazis, dead bodies were scattered over the roadway. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia that, with medication and hospitalization, seemed to stabilize. He returned to Yale, where professors and students gave him a safe place.

But when brilliance meets madness, the intersection can be lethal. Michael was smart enough to manipulate people into thinking he was more stable than he was. After the New York Times wrote a feature story about him ("A Voyage to Bedlam and Part Way Back"), publishers clamored for a memoir and movie producer Ron Howard began working on a docudrama.

Those two pressures might have helped lead to his final, terrible psychotic break: He slaughtered his pregnant girlfriend with a butcher knife.

Rosen doesn't write this book, subtitled "A Story of Friendship, Madness and the Tragedy of Good Intentions," as a lurid expose but as a thoughtful examination of his friend's descent. He also plumbs the medical profession's contradictory and often counterproductive treatments for mentally ill people, the role politicians have played in cutting funds and de-institutionalizing, and ordinary people's blind desire for a simple cure.

"The Best Minds" is an absorbing story of one man's tragic life. But it is also an important examination of how much we know and can do — and, more crucially, how little.

The Best Minds

By: Jonathan Rosen.

Publisher: Penguin Press, 560 pages, $32.