Anywhere But Here
Adele is fleeing small-town boredom and what she believes to be the dead-end lives of her mother and sister. She is pulled west by the desire to find a rich new husband for herself and to make Ann (in Ann's own words) "a child star while I was still a child." The Hollywood they seek is the legendary Hollywood of talent scouts and overnight discovery. The California through which they move is a series of apartments never quite furnished, and never quite adequate jobs for Adele: teacher, restaurant hostess, even maid. As Adele continues to pursue her fantasies with an almost demonic energy and ingenuity—constantly outraging Ann's growing sense of the real-the violence, the love, the subtlety of feeling that bind this mother and daughter are made piercingly clear. Anywhere But Here is a novel that freshly and powerfully reveals—through its portrayal of a mother and daughter bound for California and the Midwestern family left behind—a host of American myths and dreams as they take shape in the present. The eternal trek westward and the yearnings that fuel it-the obsessive desire to rise in the world, the passion to be anywhere but the here we are born to, a belief in the amazing grace conferred by the right possessions—these are the totems embodied in the restless, ambitious Adele August. As the novel opens she is on the road with her 12-year-old daughter Ann, running away to California in her splendid (unpaid-for) white Lincoln Continental.
As their pilgrimage proceeds toward the dreamed-of-future, the stories of those left behind in Bay City, Wisconsin—told in the voices of Adele's mother and sister—carry for the reader their own surprises, while they also bear witness to the power of time and endurance, the pull of past and of family.
It is the special quality of Mona Simpson's novel to give us characters who are at once emblems of American life and totally individual and alive in their moral complexity and emotional range. The Augusts, mother and daughter, are triumphant creations. And Adele, having her final say about "making it," provides a memorable coda to a book that holds us with its storytelling brilliance, its sharp and profound understanding, its generosity of spirit.
Physical book
Acclaim for Anywhere but HerE
“A stunning first novel—a real big, burgeoning talent. The two women in the book are American originals. Twelve-year-old Ann is a new Huck Finn, a tough, funny, resourceful love of a girl. Adele, her mother, is like no one I’ve encountered, at once deplorable and admirable—and altogether believable. Adele—and the book—are wound up brilliantly in the last few pages. It laid me out.”
—Walker Percy
“Mona Simpson has a remarkable gift for transforming the homely cadences of plain American speech into something like poetry. A stunning debut.”
—John Ashberry
“There is a sure strong sense here of the way families are, their dense conflicts and loyalties, and in particular a raw amazing heart-breaking portrayal of a new sort of mother and daughter—the sort who haven’t turned up before in anything else I’ve read.”
—Alice Munro
“Anywhere But Here would be remarkable even as a 10th novel, but it’s not; it’s the author’s first. No one would guess it. Mona Simpson writes with confidence, with a swagger. She is already a master.”
—Anne Tyler, USA Today
“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
Anywhere But Here
Excerpt
We fought. When my mother and I crossed state lines in the stolen car, I’d sit against the window and wouldn’t talk. I wouldn’t even look at her. The fights came when I thought she broke a promise. She said there’d be an Indian reservation. She said that we’d see buffalo in Texas. My mother said a lot of things. We were driving from Bay City, Wisconsin, to California, so I could be a child star while I was still a child.
“Talk to me,” my mother would say. “If you’re upset, tell me.”
But I wouldn’t. I knew how to make her suffer. I was mad. I was mad about a lot of things. Places she said would be there, weren’t. We were running away from family. We’d left home.
Then my mother would pull to the side of the road and reach over and open my door.
“Get out, then,” she’d say, pushing me.
I got out. It was always a shock the first minute because nothing outside was bad. The fields were bright. It never happened on a bad day. The western sky went on forever, there were a few clouds. A warm breeze came up and tangled around my legs. The road was dull as a nickel. I stood there at first amazed that there was nothing horrible in the landscape.
But then the wheels of the familiar white Continental turned, a spit of gravel hit my shoes and my mother’s car drove away. When it was nothing but a dot in the distance, I started to cry.
I lost time then; I don’t know if it was minutes or if it was more. There was nothing to think because there was nothing to do. First, I saw small things. The blades of grass. Their rough side, their smooth, waxy side. Brown grasshoppers. A dazzle of California poppies.
I’d look at everything around me. In yellow fields, the tops of weeds bent under visible waves of wind. There was a high steady note of insects screaking. A rich odor of hay mixed with the heady smell of gasoline. Two or three times, a car rumbled by, shaking the ground. Dry weeds by the side of the road seemed almost transparent in the even sun.
I tried hard but I couldn’t learn anything. The scenery all went strange, like a picture on a high billboard. The fields, the clouds, the sky; none of it helped because it had nothing to do with me.
My mother must have watched in her rearview mirror. My arms crossed over my chest, I would have looked smaller and more solid in the distance. That was what she couldn’t stand, my stubbornness. She’d had a stubborn husband. She wasn’t going to have a stubborn child. But when she couldn’t see me anymore, she gave up and turned around and she’d gasp with relief when I was in front of her again, standing open-handed by the side of the road, nothing more than a child, her child.
And by the time I saw her car coming back, I’d be covered with a net of tears, my nose running. I stood there with my hands hanging at my sides, not even trying to wipe my face.
My mother would slow down and open my door and I’d run in, looking back once in a quick good-bye to the fields, which turned ordinary and pretty again. And when I slid into the car, I was different. I put my feet up on the dashboard and tapped the round tips of my sneakers together. I wore boys’ sneakers she thought I was too old for. But now my mother was nice because she knew I would talk to her.
“Are you hungry?” was the first thing she’d say.
“A little.”
“I am,” she’d say. “I feel like an ice cream cone. Keep your eyes open for a Howard Johnson’s.”