Home >  A & E >  Books

'Off Keck Road' by Mona Simpson

Spare style drives Mona Simpson's work

Sunday, January 14, 2001

By Robert Peluso

	Off Keck Road By Mona Simpson Knopf $19.00

In novels such as “The Lost Father” and her stunning debut, “Anywhere But Here,” Mona Simpson laid bare the hearts and minds of female characters searching for fulfillment amid the twists and turns of the world.

With an expert eye for detail and a keen ear for dialogue, Simpson’s first-person narratives told these stories with an immediacy and intimacy that perfectly matched her themes.

Like these works, Simpson’s new novella centers on longing, but the style and narrative stance are radically different from her previous books. So, too, are the results.

Rooted in the lives of a community near Green Bay, Wis., the novella spans the late 1950s to the mid-1990s, a time menaced everywhere by the fault lines of change: Farms are sold and converted into subdivisions; family businesses give way to national chains; neighborhoods are scarred by malls.

Simpson also recognizes that these economic shifts create upheavals in values as religion weakens, divorce increases and family homesteads go to ruin under the ownership of two-income couples with neither the time nor the inclination to keep them beautiful.

Unfortunately, given the limited canvas of a novella, these changes resemble more closely the crudely painted sets that signal time changes in high school plays than they do the sustained and serious attention to material conditions typical of a novelist of her caliber.

Simpson’s characters fare slightly better, but they too are presented with frustrating concision. Bea Maxwell is a case in point. Serving as a center of consciousness for the book, Bea is truly fascinating. Smart, socially and politically aware, Bea Maxwell seems to possess a life full of potential. But when her mother is ailing, Bea returns home after working for only a short time as a copywriter in Chicago and takes part-time employment at a newspaper before becoming a real estate agent. A true homebody, Bea is also deeply restless.

With such complexity and charm, Bea is a quintessential Simpson character. But in this book, Simpson, a master at making such lives of quiet desperation compelling, withholds more than she reveals. And not only is Bea’s own life tantalizingly vague but also her interactions with other characters is frustratingly out of reach. The relationship between Bea and her mother, for instance, is drawn through only a handful of moments.

Similarly, Bea’s deeper feelings for her friend June is cryptically sketched. Again and again, Simpson curtails these complicated and engrossing relationships with a pared style and third-person presentation that keeps too tight a rein on emotional currents and reduces the characters’ powerful symphony of desire or dread to a weak assortment of notes.

In a book closer in tone to Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio” than to Sinclair Lewis’ “Main Street,” the author has outlined the eternal battle in small-town America between “permanence” and “settlement” on the one hand and the roar and tumble of the world on the other. It is a powerful and compelling story, one that could, and should, be told in full.

Regrettably, in both setting and characterization, Simpson has hacked her usual densely imagined world to the bone -- with unfortunate consequences. It defeats her talent for writing with feeling and detail about ordinary people trying to make a go of it amid the tumult of their times.

Robert Peluso is a Pittsburgh-based free-lance writer.