Book Review: Off the Bookshelf

Off Keck Road

Knopf, 167 pp., $19

Mona Simpson's first novel, Anywhere but Here, is a lyrical and deeply disturbing exploration of the relationship between a mother and daughter. It remains a must-read for budding novelists. Although Simpson's next two novels, The Lost Father and A Regular Guy, were filled with luminous prose, they did not re-create the magic of her first novel. Unhappily, her third novel, Off Keck Road, follows in this same vein. Off Keck Road is the story of Bea Maxwell, a thoughtful woman to whom nothing much happens. Bea grows up in a tiny Wisconsin town, and after college in Madison, longs for a life in New York City. Instead, after a short stint in Chicago, Bea returns home. She doesn't really date anyone, she doesn't get married, and she doesn't go anywhere. She does knit a great deal. Simpson illuminates Bea's inaction as she cuts between Bea's viewpoint, the viewpoint of her mother, and the viewpoints of June Umberhum, Bea's friend, and Shelly, a local girl afflicted with polio. Simpson's writing is gorgeous: Shelly "kept quiet in school and on the school playground. But when she said something, it could come out wrong -- a rectangular bar that stayed in the air." But much as readers want to be won over by Simpson's attempt to celebrate Bea's quiet life, it's a struggle to stay interested. The explosive energy that lit up Anywhere but Here is nowhere to be seen in Off Keck Road. Bea ruminates toward the end of her life that "there had probably been a thousand nights. Alone in the house." It felt like a thousand and one.