[In the following review, Ward offers praise for Anywhere but Here.]

Strong-minded young women have been a staple of American fiction since at least Louisa May Alcott; Willa Cather, Harper Lee, Carson McCullers and Ellen Gilchrist, among others, have all contributed to the forging of a kind of feminine Huck Finn tradition. Now, making a very impressive debut as a novelist, Mona Simpson adds an original character of her own to the line. Yet Ann August, vital as she is, generates only half the novel's energy; for, as the opening sentence (“We fought.”) bluntly announces, this is the story of two determined women, a portrait of a mother-daughter relationship as tangled and ambivalent as Electra's with Clytemnestra.

It also offers a version of a number of more recent, and peculiarly American, myths: the urge to migrate westward; material ambition; the transcending of class origins; “one by one getting the things you needed for a life.” When we first meet them, twice-married Adele August and her 12-year-old daughter, Ann, are on the road in their gorgeous, white, unpaid-for Lincoln Continental: “We were driving from Bay City, Wisconsin, to California, so I could be a child star while I was still a child.” The novel chronicles the fortunes of this unforgettable pair over the next few years until Ann finally leaves her mother for college back East and her own life, because “That's what kids do, they leave.”

In sequences as rapid and concrete as cinema, Ann observes and records how life in Beverly Hills, that city of dreams, falls short of their puerile expectations. The jobs Adele lands are ordinary; her attempts to better herself through sexual conquest are self-deluding and pathetic; she and Ann get by on a perpetual diet of ice-cream cones in a series of barely furnished apartments; Ann does not become a child star; and relations between mother and daughter deteriorate as Ann overtakes her mother in self-knowledge and integrity.

Yet thanks to the complex narrative technique which Mona Simpson manipulates so adroitly, Anywhere but Here is far from being a one-dimensional tale of failure and disillusionment. The novel is all layers, angles and open-ended possibilities. Ann's story accounts for roughly three-quarters of the book, but space is also allowed for voices from Wisconsin—those of Ann's grandmother, Lillian, and her aunt, Carol—as well as Adele herself, who is given the last word in a sad, brilliant coda. The effect of these four utterly different voices interweaving, moving back and forth between California and Wisconsin, past and present, is to add the depth of history to the shallow surface of the Beverly Hills sequences and also to set up a sort of debate around that central question: what exactly are “the things you needed for a life?”

For Adele, reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Daisy Buchanan in her single-minded devotion to rich men and classy objects, life is largely a matter of acquisitions and appearances. Returning to Los Angeles after years away, the grown-up Ann sees her mother's new house as a mere showcase of contemporary California chic: all accretion, lovely but inharmonious. “The pine bench, stripped blond and waxed, stands in front of a couch, antique armoires are set with green Limoges plates, tiny antlers, dried roses and orange peel. She shows me each thing. The Tiffany lamp … every piece collected slowly. ‘It's worth three times what I paid,’ she whispers, her eyebrows lifting.” Yet, like Daisy, Adele remains fascinating. Even at 12 Ann had realized that “Strangers almost always love my mother. And even if you hate her, can't stand her, even if she's ruining your life, there's something about her, some romance, some power. She's absolutely herself.”

Against her mother's corrosive love, Ann shores up memories of her Wisconsin childhood. A long-ago trip to storm-lashed Lake Erie with her grandmother yielded an image of comfort and security that would last throughout her uncomfortable, insecure adolescence. “At the very northern edge of land, where it was dark and late and storming, sleep seemed the easiest state to exist in. I went to sleep there fully trusting the world not to harm me. I don't know if I ever felt that safe, before or again.” Lillian's and Carol's narratives make nonsense of Adele's idea that small-town Midwestern life is just “a dead-end road.” As a college student, Ann herself is drawn back “a million times” to Bay City: “And liking it so: the yellow streetlamps, coal and sulfur piles, smokestacks by the river. A girl going home to a mill town, the familiarity and the strangeness.”

But Anywhere but Here refuses to provide simple answers to the questions it raises. The range of Mona Simpson's understanding and generosity is so great that even a really odious character like Adele can be at the same time funny, touching and persuasive. This range is manifested in Simpson's prose, which is at once effortlessly casual in tone and also an instrument of genuine subtlety. To achieve the complication of feeling that makes her novel so unsettling, she takes risks with language that a less assured writer might not have brought off. An example: Adele has just threatened to put Ann out of the car at a local Bay City orphanage. “She reached over and closed my door again. The buttercups blurred together now in one smear of color and we could hear crickets starting. Lights came on in the orphanage's small windows. Her face was over me. She looked down at me hard, as if she were looking at her own reflection in water. One of her tears dropped into my eye.”

In context this passage does not express (although it skirts) bathos. It expresses feelings it is impossible to describe as either love or hate. Like the novel as a whole, it momentarily takes your breath away.