OFF KECK ROAD, by Mona Simpson, Knopf, New York, 2000. Reviewed by Pamela Malone

I am writing this review as a corrective to the two reviews (one in the NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW) I happened to read on this novella by the writer, Mona Simpson. She wrote ANYWHERE BUT HERE, which was very successful and which was ultimately made into a movie starring Susan Sarandon.

The trouble with writing a popular book is that you will be judged ever after to keep repeating the feat. OFF KECK ROAD is something different, and therefore the reviewers seemed to miss the point. My instincts were alerted by their criticisms. They claimed the subject matter was “narrow”. The prose “spare.” All this attention being given to the quiet, unexciting life of a never married woman, who lived in Green Bay, Wisconsin, was seen as lacking in excitement and therefore of no interest.

This in a nutshell, in my opinion, is what is wrong with Arts and Letters in America today. It’s one of the reasons I return again and again to English and Japanese writers. What struck me by the description of this book was that it sounded very much like the subject matter traversed so often by my favorite contemporary English novelist, Anita Brookner.

And I already knew what a gifted writer Ms. Simpson is. She wrote the brilliant short story, “Lawns” which was anthologized in all the best of the year collections when it came out. That story dealt with the complex issue of father/daughter incest in a totally authentic and compelling way. What was so good about the story was the telling detail. Such as the fact that the main character, abused by her father still even at her college, had the habit of stealing little treats like cookies, sent in the mail to her dormitory peers from their loving families. This is a perfect story in every way.

So I was intrigued to read OFF KECK ROAD which is about a never married woman. Someone who is totally successful in her career, who gets all the exterior things just right, but then seems to be missing something when it comes to relations between the sexes. Ms. Simpson writes with deep insight and infuses what might appear on the outside to be dull subject matter, with real meaning. She illuminates her characters, which include, besides the main character, a strange girl who is different ( here the theme of sexual abuse appears again, but from an odd and not often explored angle), and a divorced woman who becomes intimate friends with Bea (probably Bea’s only really close relationship with another human being) and whose ins and outs with men provide a kind of primer for Bea--though ultimately not in any way that can help her with men.

“Her demeanor with them [men] was the same as with everyone: happy, cheerful, busy, occupied, oblivious to the whole underworld of flirtation, as if she were missing the receiving wires.”

The prose is beautifully spare, highly crafted, always precise and the details are each and every one something to savor. There’s a bluntness that is always apt. “It was May, the branches rich with bright green buds, so beautiful it made her ache, for no reason that she knew, except not being young.”

And while we watch Bea age (from adolescence into middle age), we also watch the transformation of Keck Road, from a semi-rural place with a few ramshackle houses, bulging at the seams with families with large broods of children, to an overdeveloped tacky place with a Wall-Mart and Fast Food chains. And one can only think that in both cases--Bea’s life and the life of the street, something has gone awry, an opportunity missed, and there’s nothing to be done. And yet there’s a quiet dignity in every life and this is as true for Bea as anyone else.

I highly recommend this book as an example of a writer doing her finest work. Pay no attention to those reviewers who are only satisfied with contemporary shocks and fireworks on every page. There’s more to literature than car crashes, and I wish the small still moment, expressed in the perfect words, were more appreciated here.