[In the following review, Cooke offers a positive evaluation of The Lost Father. Drawing attention to the novel's archetypal quest theme, Cooke concludes that the novel is “a beautiful, original chronicle of a woman-odyssey rare in literature.”]

My mother never lost her faith in men, but after years, it became more general. She believed a man would come and be my father, some man. It didn't have to be our original one, the one we'd prayed to first as one and only. Any man with certain assets would do.

In this we disagreed, but quietly. I was becoming a fanatic.

What does a girl miss, growing up without a father? Is it maleness in general, the obverse of Mother, a bright yang to her shadowy yin? Or is it the father in particular, the “one and only,” destiny made manifest by the arch of his feet and the set of his chin? The father quest is archetypal, old as the oldest stories. (Robert Bly take note.) Homer has Telemachus sail to Pylos not to find Odysseus but to look for him. The quest triggers a dormant gene and transforms Telemachus from a mama's boy into his father's son. (Is it different for a girl? Is a girl her mother?) Mythic (absent) fathers don't raise children; in the eternal conflict between loyalty to home and the world, the best and the worst of men always seem to choose the world. Agamemnon dupes his wife and kills his daughter just for a clear day of sailing for Troy. Mohammed—“John”—Atassi, the Lost Father of this novel, may be among the best men or the worst—a compulsive gambler, a womanizer, a prince, maybe the John F. Kennedy of Egypt. He abandons his wife, daughter and a professorship at a Midwestern university. He disappears, into America probably, leaving no forwarding address or phone.

The Lost Father is Mona Simpson's second novel. It is a sequel to her first, Anywhere but Here, in which a young protagonist named Mayan Atassi Stevenson chronicles her peregrinations across America with her preternaturally loyal mother—a Penelope with wanderlust—who weaves plans instead of shrouds, first plans of finding and winning back the lost father, and later of winning anyone at all “with certain assets.” Her suitors, who include an ice-skating pro and a “goofy” orthodontist, appall Mayan and her mother with their ordinariness. Searching and waiting for “real life” have purified them and gotten them hooked on abstract men—mysterious, mythic, transcendental. As Mayan puts it, “All you have to do to be somebody's God is disappear.”

What this novel does best is capture the stale hurt of the fatherless, the impulse toward self-perfection and self denial that connects love to disappearance and romanticizes desire:

If I were a bride preparing myself for something sacred, I decided I'd start a long time in advance and give everything up. That would take a long time. … I would make my days simple, eating little, drinking only water, keeping order among what I had, my few clothes clean and folded. I would own less and less. I would go to sleep every night early. I would give away more and more, write one letter each night before bed. Then I would begin to be ready. … But sex in my life had never happened that way. That was a picture in a locket, an ancestor. I unlocked the door, shaking it, into the messy apartment, hoping the toilet's flushed, wishing I'd locked things into closets, and I turn the light out while we undress because I'm wearing the bad underwear, the pink ones from the wash. It's late, we smell the sharp gasping urgency of drinkers, the sheets feel gritty but warm, his skin is there, we begin and even unholy it is eternal, outside of time.

In The Lost Father Mayan still holds out for the real thing, for Dad. She clings to a few memories, to her mother's mythology of her father, but her name and her Egyptian birthright (what right?) have eroded, through neglect. People keep thinking she is named for the ruins and call her simply “Ann.” She loses the Atassi name when her mother finally remarries. Now in her late 20s, Mayan lives in New York City and halfheartedly overachieves at Columbia Medical School. She survives, hungrily, emptily, on a hospital job and chronic withdrawals from a ＄9,000 bank account—a legacy from her grandmother in Wisconsin. (“Can he ever dance—this was high conversation in Racine. My grandmother copied phrases she'd heard and repeated them. She applied herself diligently to learning the forms so she could put as little of herself into the world as possible.”) She spends her spare time browsing in telephone books, looking for her father's name, looking for any Atassi, making telephone calls, assaulting strangers with her need. Like Telemachus, she takes over the search after her mother has given up and withdrawn into an impenetrable world—in Adele Stevenson's case, this is Beverly Hills and malignant vacuity. Early on, Mayan hires a detective to help with her search, and this break from her mother hurls her over the edge of curiosity into the abyss of fanaticism. It also frames the story's structure. The novel ends when Mayan finds her father or blows her whole ＄9,000—whichever comes first.

Simpson can wring truth and beauty out of a bag of doughnuts. For all its 506 pages of questing, her prose is vivid and precise as good poetry—more lyrical, more language-fired than Sue Miller's or Anne Tyler's, more ambitious than Amy Hempel's or Susan Minot's. Although The Lost Father lacks the powerful mother from Anywhere but Here, the gutsy conspiratorial quality of two women travelers with nothing to lose, Mayan's monologue has a power of its own, a hard, insistent edge—character. Even to those readers who haven't followed the rough road to California in the desperate mother-daughter romance of the first novel, it's clear that Mayan is as much a survivor of her childhood as she is a product of it. Desperate not to become her mother—a shrilly glamorous woman who responds to abandonment by trying harder next time and puts the faith some reserve for God into good suits and manicures—Mayan seeks, in this second novel, an alternative. She goes as far as Egypt.

The center of this big book, in which Mayan returns to her hometown of Racine, slogs. To contrast with Mayan's emotional and spiritual poverty, Simpson focuses lengthily on the affluence of the Briggses—a surrogate family for Mayan, rich daughter-worshippers reminiscent of Sue Miller's Midwestern Abbotts—and on her snobbery toward their world of self-indulgence, pretentious statuary and unconditional love. She protests for fifty pages—too long. The opulent tarts and cakes Mayan devours chez Briggs weigh heavily on these pages. It's all too clear that the Briggses feed some inner Mayan starved for sweetness. Mayan's anorexia, her inability to feed her body the food it needs, haunts the novel. Throughout, she keeps her body as insubstantial as possible, withholds food from herself as her father withheld love by his absence. Then she gorges on sweet nothings: raspberry tarts, doughnuts, ring cakes, boys. Too, as Mayan pursues her father quest alone in a car without a radio, her thoughts seem arbitrary, and her journey seems less than it is: “In college, I went for pilot types, strong and quiet, with sharp features so, my head on their chests, I heard heartbeats like underwater through leather jackets, and then owlish frail boys, who seemed they should always be lifting bell jars to examine specimens.” Such retrospection clutters rather than illuminates. At times too, Simpson strains for a verb, as in “The room amazed with light.” Otherwise, the novel is taut, intense with revelation. The final scenes, in which Mayan searches for the proof she needs of her father's recognition, are bizarre and mournful and rich, and expose her yawning hunger, gnawing, violent, carnivorous father-hunger—and isn't hunger emptiness?—which she thinks can be satisfied, or filled up, by pearls.

Whenever we ate with my father, we ate better. We had whole meals of fancy food and dessert. We ate it all and never worried about our weight because we knew this would just be once and not always. It wouldn't last, it would go away and remind us that chances are only once, taste ephemeral, and life in this world, all its sweetness and rain, is nothing to count on continuing because it will, but only without us. Time is short, attachment expensive, but it was worth it for us to eat every time. It never tasted enough. We had such appetite. The thing I still love best about us, my mother and me, is that we wanted so.

Unlike Telemachus, Mayan is not given the pleasure of delivering the lost father to the mother and of righteously disposing of those who doubted his return. Like him, though, she succeeds in claiming herself in the quest. The Lost Father is a beautiful, original chronicle of a woman-odyssey rare in literature. In mapping the fanatic's route to the Ultimate Transcendent Mystery, Simpson uncloaks a myth that many readers will recognize—as Dad.