[In the following review, Cheuse offers a positive assessment of Off Keck Road.]

The short form doesn't always go hand in hand with the long view. Short novels usually focus on a particular incident or scene and treat it with more fullness than a short story does, adding characters, investigating immediate situations at greater depth. But when they explore in time what they compress in length, the results can sometimes be spectacular.

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.

The book opens in Green Bay during winter 1956, when middle-class Bea Maxwell, a doctor's daughter with a slightly unsymmetrical face and virtually untested virginity, finds herself home from college and seeking some companionship. The season in her part of the world encourages loneliness. “Winter was the longest season where they lived,” Simpson writes. “At dusk, there were depths in the banks of snow, curves upon curves, a frozen sea, blue and more blue receding out the long plains, with no edges. The snow softened roofs and silos, blunting trees, shearing particulars as far as you could see.”

So Bea telephones sorority sister June Umberhum, who lives on the other side of town, off Keck Road, “with eight houses, none of them worth much, off the highway running east-west, almost out of town.” The friends talk on the local party line. A farmer's wife who lives “somewhere farther out” than the Umberhums interrupts their call. “Well, how much longer are you going to be?’” the woman asks.

A lifetime, is the answer we get in this intense short novel. Bea's lifetime. June's lifetime. The lifetime of Bea's family, the lifetime of June's down-at-the-heels neighbors, the lifetime of the nucleus of those stalwart folks who stay put in Green Bay, growing their years in one place.

Bea, steady, dependable Bea, is the main focus of the story as she tries out living in Chicago and working as a copywriter, assuaging her longing to live in New York City (which she never even visits) with what turns out to be a lifetime subscription to New York magazine. When her mother falls ill she goes home and never leaves again, making her way financially first as a journalist and then as a first-rate real-estate saleswoman, but never finding much luck in ending her solitary condition.

It's mainly from Bea's point of view that we learn of the Green Bay way of life, its tastes in music and clothing and food (the flavor, for example, of everybody's favorite local hamburger, served “on rye bread, the meat bleeding through and mixing with the odd, sweet, hot mustard”) and witness the maturation and subsequent aging of her Green Bay generation.

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 [by Steve Martin] to any boys or boy-men who came near.