A child of divorce turns private eye in the latest well-observed study of domestic dysfunction from Simpson (My Hollywood, 2010, etc.).

In some ways, Simpson's sixth novel marks a return to her first, Anywhere But Here (1986), which also features a teenage narrator struggling to comprehend a parental split. But the new book is more high concept, framed as a detective story about discovering the deceptions that can swirl around relationships. The narrator, Miles, is a bright LA high schooler who's prone to precocious antics like a money-making scheme selling lunches out of his locker. He's also picked up a more questionable eavesdropping habit, listening in on his mathematician mother's phone conversations after her marriage collapses and she pursues a new relationship with Eli, whose intentions and background strike Miles as questionable. With his friend Hector, he processes his confusion both artistically (via a comic book they create together) and pragmatically, befriending a PI who helps them get to the bottom of Eli's background. The setup is ingenious on a couple of fronts. First, making the tale a mystery adds a dose of drama to what's otherwise a stock plot about upper-middle-class divorce. Second, Miles' snapping to the role of secret eavesdropper and researcher underscores how alienated he is from his mother's confusion and heartbreak. Simpson presents Miles' tale as slightly comic; this is a story of teenage misadventures, after all. But as the truth about Eli emerges and Miles gets wise to reality, she shifts into a more serious register. "Everyone had secrets, I understood, now that I did," Miles explains. "With that one revelation, the world multiplied." Simpson's attempts to add a metafictional touch via Hector's footnote comments feel half-finished, but overall her command of the story is rock-solid.

A clever twist on a shopworn theme by a top-shelf novelist.
- Kirkus

Simpson's latest ensnaring, witty, and perceptive novel of family life under pressure in Los Angeles mines the same terrain as her much-lauded last novel, the immigrant-nanny-focused My Hollywood (2010). Here she puts a clever spin on domestic surveillance as young Miles begins spying on his mother, Irene, a mathematician, just as fault lines begin to appear in her marriage to his father, a Hollywood lawyer. Wily Miles, the overweight older brother of twin sisters he professes to loathe yet watches over tenderly, sets up phone taps of increasing sophistication, opens e-mail, eavesdrops, and paws through drawers, aided and abetted by his friend Hector, who is highly suspicious, and rightfully so, of Eli, post-separation Irene's increasingly enigmatic and elusive lover. As they muddle through middle school and high school, Miles and Hector become an adolescent American variation on Holmes and Watson, with the help of a kind, handsome private eye, Ben Orion. They also embark on a crazy entrepreneurial scheme involving troublesome pets. Simpson's opening gambit is a "Note to Customer" from the publisher of Two Sleuths, the best-selling comic created by Miles and Hector, but she wisely uses this framing device lightly, allowing this exceptionally incisive, fine-tuned, and charming novel to unfold gracefully as she brings fresh understanding and keen humor to the complexities intrinsic to each stage of life and love.

HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Simpson is a great literary favorite, and this winning novel will be supported by a cross-country author tour and plenty of publicity. —Donna Seaman, Booklist

Casebook by Mona Simpson: The consistently excellent Simpson returns with what sounds like a riff on Harriet the Spy: the story of a boy investigating his parents' disintegrating marriage. The coming-of-age narrative is complicated here, though, by the disintegration of the possibility of privacy in the age of Facebook, or Snapchat, or whatever we're all on now. Am I the only one hoping that the "stranger from Washington D.C. who weaves in and out of their lives" is Anthony Weiner? (Garth)
- The Great 2014 Book Preview, The Millions,

Protagonist Miles's parents are separating. He and his close friend Hector begin snooping around their belongings, and eavesdropping on their conversations in what begins as innocent, childlike "detective work," but soon evolves into something more serious. ––30 Books You Need to Read in 2014, Huffington Post

In The Casebook, award-winner Simpson, author of five novels that expose fraying family ties, turns a child's view on a marriage falling apart. At nine, Miles snoops on his parents, hides under their bed, rummages in his mother's drawers, and eavesdrops on her conversations. Mostly he overhears things he doesn't understand. His mum is "pretty for a mathematician". His dad, a lawyer, makes people laugh. He senses their marriage is in trouble. "Then, it happened: the permanent thing." The parents separate, leaving him devastated, then getting used to it. His buddy Hector's parents divorce, and over the years the two become yellow-page detectives, tracking down Miles's mother's new boyfriend, a "con artist of love", making espionage a habit, replacing his mother's Xanax with Vitamin C out of worry at one point. Their story, framed as a prequel to an award-winning comic-book series they have co-authoured, has delightful comic moments, and a surprising and poignant twist at the end.
- 10 Best New Books to Read, Jane Ciabattari, BBC Culture

"Casebook" (Knopf), by Mona Simpson, out April 15th. In the opening scene of Simpson's new novel, Miles Adler-Hart is hiding under his parents' bed. He's trying to eavesdrop on his mother ("the Mims," he calls her), convinced that she is having vital conversations with the moms of the other kids in his fourth-grade class to decide how much TV he will be allowed to watch. Instead, he stumbles into the breakup of his parents' marriage. Their divorce and relationships with new partners are shown through the eyes of Miles, who snoops deep into his parents' adult lives, but has limited understanding of what he discovers there. There's warm humor and deep feeling in its portrayal of the vulnerability and messiness of family life.
- Page-Turner Blog Books to Look Out For, Andrea Denhoed, New Yorker

Mona Simpson In ‘Casebook,' Simpson tells the tale of a young boy who endeavors to find out the secrets behind his parents' failing marriage (Knopf). I've never had an exclusive relationship to a room where I write. I used to want one. In my 20s, I'd look up and see the windows in New York and think of the apartments left empty all day by their owners who went to work in offices. "I need an office!" I thought. I could have used one of those empty rooms. In my 30s, I wrote in the back house of a ramshackle Spanish Revival we rented across from the ocean in the Santa Monica Canyon. I wrote thousands of pages there, but in order to see another adult human being I had to steal out through the brambly side of the house, along the driveway down to the street. I was usually spotted by my child, who was still young and would cry for me. When I started writing "Casebook," I needed to be watched while I worked. I'd rented an office but I was recently divorced and traveling too much for a family illness. I thought that I could hold it together for a day's work if other people were around. I wouldn't let myself cry in public. I wrote the first draft on a table in the Santa Monica Public Library. Now I write at home. I revised the last 11 drafts, red-penciled the copy editing and marked the first-pass galleys at different places in the house; sitting on the floor next to the heating vent, on my bed, at the kitchen table, leaning back in my chair with my feet up on the desk. Writers collect stories of rituals: John Cheever putting on a jacket and tie to go down to the basement, where he kept a desk near the boiler room. Keats buttoning up his clean white shirt to write in, after work. Instead of a dedicated room, my best trigger is the actual habit of reading over the texts from the day before. Marking. Changing. Fussing. This ritual amounts to a habit of trust. Trust that I can make it better. That if I keep trying, I will come closer to something true.
- Writer's Room, The New York Times Style Magazine

With best bud Hector, Miles plays amateur spy in a touching tale of teens trying to make sense of their parents' marriages and divorces. But tapping telephones and intercepting notes just might lead to more than the boys can handle.
- New Book Picks, Good Housekeeping

"A new novel from Anywhere But Here writer Mona Simpson is big news. We're psyched for Casebook, the story of an unraveling family that asks: How much do snoops really want to find?"
- What We Love About April, Marie Claire

"Wait a minute. There's a new Lydia Davis collection out this month and Mona Simpson has a novel out full of unforgettable characters the likes of which only one of our best writers can create? April sure is shaping up to be one of 2014's most important months for literature."
- 10 Must-Read Books for April, Jason Diamond, flavorwire.com

"Mona Simpson has always written movingly about young characters, from the protagonists of her early stories Lawns and Approximations to Ann in her debut novel Anywhere But Here. That makes Casebook a return of sorts: narrated by a boy who begins spying on his parents, only to discover more about them, and the family, than he ever thought he would. And yet, Casebook is a departure also - looser, edgier, with a vivid conditionality. 'I was a snoop,' her narrator, Miles Adler-Rich, tells us, 'but a peculiar kind. I only discovered what I most didn't want to know.'"
- LA Times Spring Arts Preview

“The success of this absorbing novel rests on Simpson's ability to make that well-worn marital argument just as uncomfortable and perplexing as it was when you were having it with your own spouse…. Through Lola and her friends, we're introduced to a tight network of immigrant child-care workers, women charged with the ultimate responsibilities but subjected to casual humiliations, plied with lavish compliments and stung by racist assumptions, exhorted to stay except when they're being threatened with deportation. They're an agile, wary group, these nannies, sometimes servants, sometimes teachers, stand-in mothers and pinch-hitting maids.It's a poignant vision of the upstairs-downstairs structure that persists in our officially classless society. Some of the best chapters here, in Lola's voice, stand alone as powerful short stories … “My Hollywood" could easily be "Our Country."
Ron Charles, Washington Post

Novel by novel, Simpson takes tresh and disquieting approaches to fractured families. Her fifth book is a duet between Claire, a high-strung composer who has left New York for Hollywood to support her husband’s television ambitions, and Lola, a Filipina in her fifties who becomes their nanny, caring with sensitivity and love for their precocious, moody son. Claire is ambivalent about motherhood. Lola is putting her children through college while continuing to support their household in the Philippines, where she is of the same class as the Hollywood women who hire her to care for their children. Claire’s deepening loneliness as her workaholic husband becomes a stranger and her artistic struggle in a place she finds arid and alien are compelling, but compassionate, wise, and self-sacrificing Lola, with her mellifluous voice and wonderfully inventive English, rules. In her arresting portrayals of Lola and her nanny and housekeeper friends, Simpson explores a facet of American society rarely depicted with such insight and appreciation. As Lola and Claire tell their intertwined stories, Simpson subtly but powerfully traces the persistence of sexism and prejudice, the fear and injustice inherent in the predicaments of immigrants, and the complexity and essentiality of all domestic relationships.
- Donna Seaman, Booklist

Heart –wrenching…Simpson’s prose is gentle but leaves a savage trail of insights including how unlikely it is for a parent, child or nanny to walk away from this awkward triangle without bruises. This is a domestic novel and a highly political one.
Mary Pols, TIME

In her gradually unfolding, finely tuned narrative, Simpson shows how, for many women, the nanny-mom relationship grows to be more intimate than marriage...Jane Ciabattari, NPRIt takes a very subtle, sophisticated and confident writer to make our most common problems come off as unique on the page as they feel at 3 in the morning. If anyone can do it, Mona Simpson, author of "Anywhere but Here," "The Lost Father," "A Regular Guy" and "Off Keck Road," can. And does. But there's more.Susan Salter Reynolds, The Los Angeles TimesIn her first novel since Off Keck Road (2000), Simpson tells a blistering story of fractured love and flailing parents. Claire, a new mother and composer, has moved to Santa Monica, Calif., so that her husband Paul can follow his dreams of becoming a TV comedy writer. When Paul’s job requires late nights, Claire, already overwhelmed with balancing motherhood and career, hires Lola, a middle-aged Filipina, to help with her son, Williamo, and soon Lola’s trying to plug holes in Claire and Paul’s slowly sinking family ship. Claire and Lola narrate in alternation chapters; fragile and sometimes fierce Claire deploys a biting wit that shreds the pretensions that permeate her social life and her marriage, while Lola is more open-hearted and eager to help people, though she also draws laughs with her observations about wealthy families. The story both satirizes and earnestly assesses the failings of upper-middle-class L.A., and Simpson’s taut prose allows her to drill into the heart of relationships, often times with a single biting sentence. Funny, smart, and filled with razor sharp observations about life and parenthood, Simpson’s latest is well worth the wait.
Publisher's Weekly Review

This is classic Simpson . . . she is direct, unsentimental, an observer coolly marking down the customs of the domestic world . . . the household dynamics, in which the most serious and potent truths are told.
David Ulin, O Magazine

My Hollywood explores two different Hollywoods. There’s the one inhabited by Claire, a middling composer of classical music whose career orbit has been wobbled by a new planet—the birth of her son—and challenged by her husband’s all-consuming efforts to break into and then maintain a career as a television writer. And there’s the real focus of the book, the Hollywood inhabited by the nanny Claire has hired, Lola, an insightful Filipina who immigrated to raise money to educate her children back home. In some ways it is a familiar story. But Simpson uses these identifiable character types to examine the nature of relations, and love, and modern urban families, as children bond with immigrant hired help as readily as with their biological parents.
Scott Martelle, Publishers Weekly

The two women narrate alternating chapters, and the contrast in their voices is a double-Dutch game of masterful writing: Claire, privileged and damaged, floats along in a daze of unfulfillment, while the ever-practical Lola observes the L.A. milieu with a realist’s eye in imperfect yet oddly poetic English . . . It’s the tender, persevering Lola who is the book’s true emotional pulse . . . A character as rich as Lola won’t easily fade from anyone’s mind.
Missy Schwartz, Entertainment Weekly

Simpson’s novel shows the intricacies and inequities of domestic politics. ...“My Hollywood” is a smart, topical, absorbing novel that explores the macro economy, the micro economy and the world of work, both inside and outside the home. Mona Simpson writes adroitly about domestic matters, and she knows the domestic matters.
Jeffrey Ann Goudie, Kansas City Star

New mother Claire, a cellist and classical composer, is married to a workaholic TV writer and stranded in a cultural desert. Uncertain of her parenting skills and desperate for creative time, she hires a Filipina nanny, Lola. Writing in both women’s voices, Simpson (Anywhere But Here) deploys a sharp eye and mordant wit to show us the backstairs view of a Hollywood we’ve never seen.
Roxana Robinson, More Magazine

“Emotional grandeur, rendered in the vernacular, has been Mona Simpson’s forte.
[…] And yet, if one sets aside the false equation that more pages equal greater seriousness, something delicate and open-ended emerges here that constitutes a subtle challenge to the centrality of blood ties in Simpson’s other, highly regarded novels. Off Keck Road marks the place where origin leaves off and improvisation begins”
Stacey D’Erasmo, The New York Times

“Off Keck Road is a beautifully orchestrated work of miniaturist effects. In its portrayal of unfulfilled lives slowly slipping away – abundant only in their melancholy and regret – it calls to mind the lonely, thwarted heroines of Anita Brookner. In its lean, unfussy prose and subtle accumulation of the barest of details, it bears the mark of Raymond Carver. [….]Off Keck Road is Simpson’s best book since her first. With its astute rendering of provincial life, its pitch-perfect capture of midwestern laconicism, its sincere compassion for ordinary people, this little volume adds up to a large fictional achievement.”
Dan Cryer, Newsday

“[…] Simpson here examines the cost of acquiescence, of missed opportunities. Somehow, despite the circumscribed territory she has allotted herself, Off Keck Road feels vast in scope, conjuring the sweep of history and countless miles of road not taken. The result is mournful, sly, philosophical and bitterly funny—often all at one, as when a character describes the act of knitting as sounding ‘like little bones snapping’ (just let that one sink in for a minute) or when Simpson discloses Bea’s habit of imagining her free-spirited pal, June, having sex with men. ‘That was another way Bea used their friendship, all those years, without June ever knowing.’ With lines like that, Off Keck Road is as soft-spoken a literary tour de force as one can ever hope to read.”
Aaron Gell, W Magazine

“When Bea Maxwell returns to her small home town, in 1964, after college and a stint at a big-city ad agency, she wants to believe that this is not the end of her story—that the chapter including ‘the startling redemption’ is still to come. But what follows is less a story than a catalogue of fragile moments that never crystallize into actual events. Bea wrestles with the propriety of a woman telephoning a man, flirts awkwardly with a priest, and deflects a sexual advance from her married boss, to her regret. It’s not easy to write a novel in which the central tragedy is that nothing happens, but the author uses the cumulative power of small details to convince us that Bea’s stalled life is a life worth knowing.”
“Briefly Noted,” The New Yorker

“Novelist Percy Walker compared Anywhere But Here (1987), Mona Simpson’s highly acclaimed, best-selling debut novel about a mother and daughter hitting the road, to Huckleberry Finn. Fair enough; Off Keck Road (Alfred A. Knopf), then, might be her Mrs. Bridge—a quietly tragic study of the hovering but never quite realized possibilities of a passive, provincial woman’s life. It’s also a fascinating and deeply thoughtful counterpoint to the recent crop of single-gal-on-the-loose chick-lit offerings.
[…] Bea Maxwell, mid-twentieth century, falls between the two. She wastes her life dreaming like Gustave Flaubert’s character, but like Helen Fielding’s, she has the option of self-willed change—change that, in the end, her friend June is able to make, while she herself is not. Bea is blessed with more choices than Emma Bovary, tormented by fewer than Bridget Jones; her tragedy is neither acute nor fatal—just chronic, not unlike that of her most direct novelistic ancestor, India Bridge.”
Marisa Bowe, Vogue

“The book is, perhaps, a tribute to the unsung souls who opt not to travel far and wide and instead stay behind in their small hometowns, where life continues one day to the next largely unchanged. It is also, in a much more subtle manner, a story about how two lives, so different, can be so similar.”–
Lori Tobias, Rocky Mountain News

“In her latest work of fiction, the accomplished Mona Simpson chooses time over length, and the results are moving. Off Keck Road places her squarely in the tradition of such masters of the material of the bounded life of the Middle West as Willa Cather and Sherwood Anderson.
[…] Maturation. Aging. There’s that time factor that short fiction usually affords us little of. But here, for all of its breadth and the sharp sense of detail that Simpson gives us of Middle American life, there is an urgency to the narrative rhythm that carries us all too swiftly through to Bea’s middle age. Everyone she knows is ‘hankering after a life that looked like a picture.’ In other words, they want permanence. None, of course, can have it, and that poignant sense of closure that looms ever so much nearer on the horizon than any of the characters figured when they started out gives this short work a depth of feeling many longer novels lack.
[…] If I were a young woman in my mid-20s, I would buy Off Keck Road for myself and my female friends to weep over, and give copies of Shopgirl to any boys or boy-men who came near.”
Alan Cheuse, Chicago Tribune

In fewer than 200 pages, Green Bay native Mona Simpson has created a rich, Chekhovian world of longing and loneliness, of missed opportunities and small-town dramas.

[…] They are all, in their own ways, looking for love, for validation, for adventure. And their lives are shot through with near-misses and might-have-beens, which Simpson renders in spare but evocative prose.
[…] There is nary a wasted scene or false note in this book. Simpson has an eye for the telling detail, an ear finely tuned to Wisconsin vowels and a wit sly enough to describe one over-confident character his way: ‘She iddn’t seem to know – the way other women here did – that being pretty had an end date, like milk.’
Without patronizing either her characters or their setting, the author captures the quotidian trade-offs of small-town life: the ideal of marriage and family vs. the messy reality; comforting familiarity vs. claustrophobic intimacy; capitalist notions of progress vs. vanishing landmarks.

[…] It is the character of Bea that will strike universal chords.
[…] She is an American version of one of those Anita Brookner heroines – someone who holds things together for countless others at great cost to herself. ‘She was stylish,’ Simpson writes, ‘in a way that made some people in town more suspicious than impressed, and others merely hopeful for her. ‘Well, but she keeps herself up,’ they said.’”
Whitney Gould, Journal Sentinel

“A gleam infuses Mona Simpson’s lovely, rueful and uncharacteristically compact new effort, which spans almost five decades in the lives of two memorable women.
[…] In these pages, Green Baby comes across as timeless and familiar, an Everyplace in which the civic tempo reassuringly thrums with petty biases and gossip about imploding marriages and how many of the Davis girls lost their virginity to that blond boy from the dairy farm. It is the sort of town in which nothing – and everything – happens, where the big news is not the Packers’ latest victory but the drive-in movie’s Friday night fish fry and the morning’s big surprise: the bottle of spiked homemaker eggnog a friend has left by your back door in the snow.
[…] By layering each woman’s story through short, understated scenes, Simpson nearly manages to telescope time: friendship, sex, failure, misunderstanding, squandered chances and death all occur here without much ceremony or elaboration.
[…] A persistent image throughout is of Bea, needles snapping, knitting scarves and capes for young polio victims, sweaters for herself, snoods for her mother, ‘new home’ throws for the young couples to whom she sells houses. ‘Off Keck Road’ may lack the impressive heft and scope of Simpson’s first two novels, but it reiterates her grasp of the huge, tangled skein of the human experience and her skill at weaving into her characters and readers alike a reverence for life’s great cravings: to be useful and to be loved.”
Margaria Fichtner, The Buffalo News

“Simpson’s most powerful and moving writing is reserved for the fragile, makeshift alliances that sustain her characters, though she turns her deadly irony even on these.”
– Margaret Walters, The Sunday Times

“Ms. Simpson’s newest novel and her best so far, A Regular Guy, […] involves a young woman damaged by the itinerant, feckless adults who have failed to care for her, and the girl’s sense of complicity in the adult crimes going on around her.”
– Vince Passaro, The New York Observer

“Ultimately it is Simpson’s delicate grasp of family planning and misplanning, of legitimate versus illegitimate parenting and the machinations of creativity and selling-out that make this rich and winding story so mesmerizing.”
– Publisher’s Weekly

“It is no secret that families, even imagined ones, are not what they used to be. And in her luminous and most brilliantly realized novel to date, Mona Simpson, one of our most gifted chroniclers of modern family bonds, has finally proven Tolstoy’s axiom wrong for this age: Not all happy families are alike and not every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Instead, throughout the delicate and vast A Regular Guy, Simpson gives us a bittersweet portrait of the new American family – a complex constellation of drifters, dreamers, distant relatives and lost parents all of whose lives swirl around one child. In the process, she beautifully illuminates an updated turn on Tolstoy’s truth: It is the happy family that is unique in its contentment and the unhappy one whose unhappy ways are achingly familiar, even universally recognizable, to an entire generation just now on the cusp of adulthood.

The defining element of Simpson’s previous works, the missing and longed for family, is merely the starting point for A Regular Guy. And in casting a wider net, Simpson offers not only glimpses of one particular and specific struggle for familial identity, but also the universality that this search has come to signify for a generation often raised in fractured, divorced, nomadic and otherwise unsettled conditions.”
– Liesel Litzenburger, The Detroit News/Free Press

“Mona Simpson has a remarkable gift for depicting interior urgency. Whether ordinary or eccentric, her characters have something at stake. Neither overly tender nor patently ironic about their lives, they inhabit those lives with stubborn intent, without apology, which makes them all the more genuine and exasperating.

[…] Owens is by no means a cold, distant man in a gray suit. He’s in love with the idea of love, a dreamer with unshakable faith in himself who can’t accept the banal or disingenuous: he’s a strict vegetarian who doesn’t believe in sending Jane to school until the schools improve both their methods and their menus, even if he has to launch his own campaign. And he is not loved unconditionally; his immense good fortune ignites resentment in those who benefit most from it. It is finally Owens’ transformation—born of failure—and Jane’s more gradual hold on who she is and what she hopes for, that bring their beautifully crafted story full circle.”
– Debroah Noyes, Miami Herald

“The Lost Father picks up the story of Ann Stevenson, the 12-year-old central figure of the earlier novel, years later, as she attempts to cope with medical school, an isolated life in New York City and, most important, her lifelong obsession with finding the father she never knew. She hasn’t seen him since she was 12. Then he was a mundane, well-educated sort of drifter-dreamer, an immigrant from Egypt; she has no idea of his new profession, though she entertains the persistent hope that it is mysterious and exotic (international gambler? gigolo?) and part of the glamorous reason for his absence. Ann now calls herself Mayan, the name her father gave her, and her new level of obsession is extreme: at times the reader feels that next to her, Ahab is a man with a notion, Humbert Humbert a guy with an odd craving.

[…] it is a superb book. [...] a wave of wanting to know does start building; it does become urgent that we see if Mayan ever finds her father and, if so, what happens next. The portrait of Mayan that emerges is marvelous in its acuity and richness. ‘The thing I still love best about us, my mother and me,’ she says, ‘is that we wanted so.’ Ms. Simpson evokes precisely the gritty and visceral intensity of that need.

Despite her unhappiness, Mayan finds the world beautiful (‘This was my only way of praying’), and the author’s language can be breathtaking in the simple beauty of its imagery (‘The streets felt quieter than Cairo,’ she says, speaking of Alexandria, ‘neighborhoods lower, the old sun like a bucket full of water spilled on the bricks’) or in its combination of the lyrical and the astute (‘When she made promises like that,’ Mayan observes of her mother, ‘her eyes filled to the surface as if the part of her that wished crossed the part of her that lied and gave a certain kind of smiling face with tears, like a rainbow”). Mona Simpson demonstrates, throughout this novel, a spectacular talent for rendering tumultuous emotional states with eloquence and economy. Speaking of the clarifying effect her father has had on her life, Mayan says, ‘He gave us ourselves back in real light.’ In its wisdom, grace, generosity, and intelligence, The Lost Father does the same for us.”
– Jim Shepard, The New York Times

“The Lost Father is a sequel in spirit to Mona Simpson’s first novel, the best-selling ‘Anywhere But Here.’ Intimate in scale, it is profound in implication: a study of the effects of being unfathered.

[…] Simpson’s work takes on a larger meaning when this deep longing for a father is reflected in the virtually universal need for a higher being, the one who loves without qualification, who nourishes when there is no bread, and who protects, even beyond death. ‘All you had to do to become somebody’s God is disappear.’

At the fulcrum of the novel, Ann goes to Egypt to find her father among his forbears. In a beautiful scene that contains elements of the virgin birth, a retrieval of innocence and the grace that love affords, Ann experiences a homeland and the Egyptian people. She encounters a young Egyptian man, and begins her healing.

In Ann’s story there’s a resurrection, a crisis in faith and a resolution as natural an inevitable as life itself. ‘Why you are unwanted: That is the only question. In the end, you understand, that is always the question you came here to ask…And at the same time…you understand too…that is the one question no one can ever answer you.’

An essence of family life has been distilled; unsweetened, it is a heady perfume. Mona Simpson’s The Lost Father evokes reflections on the nature of families, of constancy and of love. It’s an enriching experience.”
– Beverly Langer, San Francisco Chronicle

“Here Simpson writes with mature skill and energy about a character fueled by complex aches and longings. Mayan desperately feels the need to find her father, if only to prove to him that she made a life for herself, despite his absence. At the book’s end she does find the understanding she seeks. She finds her safe place within herself.”
– Lorenzo Carcaterra, People

“For all its exquisite excess and brimming detail, The Lost Father is really about a space that can never be filled: the absence created by the father, the void left untended by the mother. In this light, Mayan’s self-awareness, even in the midst of her despair, grants her story the vision of the middle distance – she’s not so much standing on a bluff and surveying the wreckage as she is doing a fancy cliff walk, reporting back despite all her cuts and bruises.

[…] One is inevitably left with a sense of sorrow and resolution at the end of The Lost Father, which, for all its attention to missed connections and random moments, is really about the accumulation of time. So that is what family is, one thinks – not just a birthright or a face in a photograph, but the slow, constant gathering of history as well as love.”
– Gail Caldwell, Boston Globe

“Emory, a minor character in Mona Simpson’s second novel, makes miniature buildings out of toothpicks and glue – factories, temples, civic centres, bridges. The Lost Father is somewhat similar: a bulky volume, over 500 pages, but put together in an extraordinarily intricate way, tense, complicated, yet surprisingly airy.

[…]The father, when she and we finally get to meet him, is a wonderful creation, chariming but not in the flamboyant way Mayan expects, a winsome, vain creature who cannot satisfy the combative emotional demands of a mid-western college girl. The end of this fine novel is as much a clash of cultures as an Oedipal reckoning.”
– Mary Morrissy, The Independent on Sunday

“In relating the story of Ann and her mother, Adele, Ms. Simpson not only creates a compelling tale of family love and duplicity, but she also takes on – and reinvents – many of America’s essential myths, from our faith in the ever-receding frontier to our uneasy mediation between small-town pieties and big-time dreams. […] But if Anywhere But Here carries echoes of the “on the road” novel, the “small town” novel, and the Western-pioneer novel, Ms. Simpson also succeeds in creating a wholly original work – a work stamped with the insignia of a distinctive voice and animated by two idiosyncratic and memorable heroines.
[…] Indeed, it is one of Ms. Simpson’s many achievements in this sad, fierce novel that she makes us understand about families—how we are trapped by them and how we can escape; how we are irrevocably shaped by the defections and betrayals of others, and how we may transcend those losses through love and will. She makes us understand the idea of home and what it means to lose that idea of safety and place; and in doing so, she makes us apprehend the darkness that lies just beneath the brightly painted surfaces of daily life.”
– Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Strong-minded young women have been a staple of American fiction since at least Louisa May Alcott; Will Cather, Harper Lee, Carson McCullers and Ellen Gilcrhist, among others, have all contributed to the forging of a kind of feminine Huck Finn tradition. Now, making a very impressive debut as a novelist, Mona Simpson adds an original character of her own to the line. Yet Ann August, vital as she is, generates only half the novel’s energy; for, as the opening sentence (“We fought.”) bluntly announces, this is the story of two determined women, a portrait of a mother-daughter relationship as tangled and ambivalent as Electra’s with Clytemnestra.

[…] To achieve the complication of feeling that makes the novel so unsettling, she takes risks with language that a less assured writer might not have brought off. An example: Adele has just threatened to put Ann in an orphanage. ‘She reached over and closed my door again. The buttercups blurred together now in one smear of color and we could hear crickets starting. Lights came on in the orphanage’s small windows. Her face was over me. She looked down at me hard, as if she were looking at her own reflection in water. One of her tears dropped into my eye.’

In context this passage does not express (although it skirts) bathos. It expresses feelings it is impossible to describe as either love or hate. Like the novel as a whole, it momentarily takes your breath away.”
– Elizabeth Ward, The Washington Post

“Simpson’s novel achieves its force not so much through plotting as through the steady accumulation of sharply drawn scenes. In less skilled hands, such narration could easily become shapeless and repetitious. But Simpson has a sure instinct for the flash points of love and rage in her characters and she soft-pedals nothing. Though Anywhere But Here is Simpson’s first novel, she has already earned a place beside domestic pioneers like Anne Tyler and Alice Munro. She has not only shaken the family tree, she has plucked it from its soil to expose its tangled system of roots.”
– Richard Panek, Chicago Tribune

“Simpson makes the scatty cloud-battling of Adele’s and Ann’s lives grotesque, funny and bitingly real. But she is not engaged in easy judgment. Into their story, she inserts episodes from the lives of Adele’s family back in Wisconsin. Taken by themselves, Adele’s and Ann’s choices seem tinselly and foolish. Taken in contrast to what they have left behind, the matter is not so simple. Simpson’s vision is very dark. Love, hope and a decent and humane life are as elusive in the old America as in the new one.

[…] The book’s rich texture and its ingenious tracking of our far-fetched normalities mark Simpson as a brightly talented new writer. Something deeper and more exciting than bright talent is suggested by the stony pain of Carol’s narration, and by subtle variations of Ann’s outbursts and silences, with their light and terrible shadows.”
– Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times

“Anywhere But Here is Simpson’s first novel, and it is a dazzling one indeed. Layer after layer of short, intense scenes produces a powerful cumulative impact. By the end, a reader knows these characters thoroughly, cares about them and has experienced the awful glory of evanescent triumph and life-wrenching tragedy.

[…] This is real life, genuine feeling, the prose proclaims in sentence after sentence. This is real heartbreak, this is America dreaming and crashing and, in spite of everything, going on.

Adele dares to be a great and misguided dreamer, like Willy Loman in ‘Death of a Salesman,’ like Blanche DuBois in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire,’ like Hickey in ‘The Iceman Cometh.’ When, near the close of the book, she tells her daughter, ‘Life is just too little, isn’t it?’ we can see that Adele transcends her own victimhood. Even so, she cannot bear to recognize the victim she herself has created.”
– Dan Cryer, Newsday

“Mona Simpson’s first novel Anywhere But Here is a wonder: big, complex and masterfully written, it’s an achievement that lands her in the front ranks of our best younger novelists. She charts the fortunes of a mother and daughter, Adele and Ann, who make their way from rural Wisconsin to Hollywood—‘so I could be a child star while I was still a child,’ as Ann explains it.

[…] One of the most welcome pleasures of this book is its old-fashioned sense of amplitude. Not many serious novelists these days strike a reader as generous; more often they seem to feed us on scraps. Simpson doesn’t skimp, and she uses details of food and clothing to refine a scene rather than sum it up. Anywhere But Here signals the arrival of a distinguished new writer, and one with a mind of her own.”
– Laura Shapiro, Newsweek

“Some scenes are excruciating, difficult to read. Yet Adele isn’t merely a hateful monster, a cardboard Mommie Dearest. She’s a vibrant, three-dimensional woman, wounded as well as wounding, as is the bond between the two women. And Simpson’s triumph is to have given us two such compelling women and a relationship that is as loving and destructive, vulnerable and indestructible, as triumphant as her characters.”
– Alix Madrigal, The San Francisco Chronicle

“This heartbreaking novel is told in a voice as clear and unencumbered as the California light it describes. With her lip-trembling courage, her petty thefts, her survivor’s humor, Ann August is so evocative that she feels more like a gifted, troubled cousin than a fictional creation.

[…] Anywhere But Here is a moving, extraordinary achievement: its mother-daughter team one of the most intricately rendered in contemporary fiction. Simpson writes about family – about the debts and betrayals of intimacy – with the clinical accuracy of Jayne Anne Phillips or Louise Eldrich: like both those writers, she allows the institution a gentle respect while skewering its more deplorable excesses. The ending of the novel – as flat as the Midwestern prairies, where anything is possible – has a graceful, certain tone anything grander would undercut. Adele’s hollow fantasies somehow soften her worst crimes, all perpetrated in the name of something she calls love. This is a story of misguided dreams and the passion that fuels them – and America where security is a drawer of unopened nylons, and fear a drawer of unopened bills.”
– Gail Caldwell, The Boston Globe

“A stunning novel of dashed dreams […] Simpson has an uncanny eye for detail, for the look and texture of things. […] Nothing is lost on Simpson, but she never condemns her characters: she’s a witness, not a judge.”
– James Atlas, Vanity Fair