Mona Simpson, who has brought us the wondrously moving and compelling stories
behind ANYWHERE BUT HERE, THE LOST FATHER, and A REGULAR GUY, now writes OFF
KECK ROAD, a short but touching story about everyday people who turn to their
homesteads and go back after being out in the world for a while --- not the
usual travelers and searchers that her other books are all about. OFF KECK
ROAD, a small, somewhat used-up Wisconsin suburb, is not an exciting place to
live but it offers a certain haven for characters who have been hurt by life
in the world-at-large. It is her simplest and perhaps most impressive book.
Bea Maxwell, daughter of one of Green Bay's leading families, befriends a
ragtag group of residents when she returns home from trying to make a life
for herself in Chicago. Called back due to her mother's illness, Bea returns
to the place where she was something of an anomaly --- the peppy high school
leader who barely had time for boys and all the other ruffles and frills the
other high school girls enjoyed: "It was as if adolescence --- that new word
that everyone all of a sudden knew --- was a contagion Bea somehow had not
caught. She agreed with her reasonable parents that dieting yourself half to
death was dangerous. She found high heels ridiculous. She ate casseroles and
desserts with the abandon of a ten-year-old boy." Even after an affair is
suggested to her, Bea, always the virgin, keeps her heart locked away and her
virtue sacrosanct. It defines her in a way that nothing else does.
In the midst of the town, there is nothing but gossipy old ladies and, on the
other side, Bea and her strange friends --- divorcees, priests, philandering
husbands. But the life she leads with these cohorts is as fulfilling as any
other might have been, especially for the tiny suburb to which she has
returned --- a world that harkens back to the world of The Music Man, a world
where being different is considered a threat to the way of life of the rest
of the people who have always lived there and never left at all. OFF KECK
ROAD packs a powerful wallop into 167 pages --- a paean to those who live
their own lives in their own way and are happy with that. Isn't that what
everybody wants anyway? A lovely book.
--- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano
