Louis Simpson once wrote that 'The Open Road goes to the used-car lot.' It doesn't any more. It goes to a suburban cul-de-sac where:

     Most people are content
     to make a decent living.
     They take pride in their homes and raising a family.
     The women attend meetings at the PTA …
     There aren't too many alternatives.

The prosaic nature of the language mirrors the life-style, as does its easy-going, good-natured tone of speech. Simpson's poems [in Caviare at the Funeral] are all 'up front'. He can talk about spiritual emptiness without being boring. He's never superior to his subject. It's a considerable and democratic art. If life is prosaic it still has to he understood. A couple stand by the freeway with their broken-down car. 'They look surprised, and ashamed / to be so helpless … let down in the middle of the road!'… The American Dream is beached by the roadside. Simpson's characters are like people in an Edward Hopper painting. They look up from their work-bench or office-desk to find themselves strangely exiled in the light and landscape that surrounds them. America is something 'other' than they thought and worked for. The gods killed at Wounded Knee now stare back above the sprinklers in Orange County. They are placated at the golf club and in the shopping mall, but still something is missing…. If America (like other Super Powers) is isolated in the world at large, then the individual American is also isolated within his own self-created world. Simpson has gradually moved from more general and symbolic statements about the American way of life ('At the end of the Open Road 1963') to a more detailed and disturbing—but essentially humane—analysis of everyday actualities….

[The sequence The Beaded Pear follows] an 'average' American suburban family through its day, using place-names, reported speech, narrative asides, and all manner of literary collage to re-create 'reality'. Simpson lets America speak for itself but, of course, the truest poetry is the most feigning, and the impression of reality so beautifully created is a considerable work of imagination, of skillfully imposed order. (p. 81)