SOURCE: “Mona Simpson: Return of the Prodigal Father,” in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 243, No. 45, November 4, 1996, pp. 50-51.

[In the following essay, based on an interview with Simpson, Bing provides an overview of Simpson's life and writing, and shares Simpson's comments about her work.]

Mona Simpson's three novels are unsparing portraits of daughters neglected by incompetent parents. At 39, the tables have turned and the novelist is a parent herself, sharing her capacious Upper West Side apartment with her son, Gabriel, who is almost three, and her husband, Richard Appel. Three years ago, in a coincidence as improbable as it is apt, Appel abandoned his job as a federal prosecutor to write full time for the TV series The Simpsons—a family that would make even the most dysfunctional household seem normal by comparison. “It's great for me” quips Simpson. “I get the stationery, put a caret in the title and write ‘Mona.’”

Clad entirely in black, her angular face animated by luminous blue eyes and just a little over five feet tall, Simpson has the place to herself on the September afternoon that PW visits. Gabriel, it turns out, is with a babysitter after being up most of the night with a cold. “He may trudge in any minute,” she warns.

At a time when many writers are recording their lives in literary memoirs instead of disguising them in fictional form, Simpson's books are refreshing reminders of the emotional resonance and disquieting candor that a good novel can still convey. In her debut, Anywhere but Here, its sequel, The Lost Father, and her latest, A Regular Guy, recently out from Knopf, Simpson dissects the same, bitter family plot that turns on a flaky mother, a daughter's struggle to win back an absent father and a family gripped by wanderlust and the allure of the West. In each novel, Simpson reworks this motif with such bravura and authority that readers have long suspected that her books have to be based on lived experience, whether she admits it or not.

In A Regular Guy, Simpson trains her gaze on the decline and fall of a flamboyant young biotech tycoon, Tom Owens, and his daughter, Jane di Natali. Rejected by Owens before her birth, Jane is reared in a commune by her shaggy and increasingly desperate mother, who, when Jane is 10, teaches her to drive a rusty truck over the Sierra mountains to the opulent California suburb where Owens lives. As critics have observed, Owens bears as sharp a resemblance to Simpson's real-life brother, Steven Jobs, the brash young cofounder of Apple Computers, as he does to the deadbeat fathers of her previous two novels. But Simpson, whose cheerful voice turns abrupt and self-conscious when faced with questions that she deems too personal, declines to address their similarities, preferring not to discuss her family at all.

As traffic roars by on Riverside Drive, details of Simpson's childhood emerge over coffee and a plate of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. Green Bay, Wis., where Simpson attended the same public school as the children of the Green Bay Packers, certainly resembles the fictional Bay City, Wis., where the first section of Anywhere but Here is set. Ann August, the heroine of that novel, is uprooted from Bay City when her highly neurotic mother, Adele, abandoned by Ann's father, absconds to Beverly Hills in a stolen car. In fact, Simpson's parents separated when she was 10, and she spent her teenage years in L.A. “The move in Anywhere but Here is totally true,” she admits. “It's probably the truest thing in the book. It's what sparked it.”

In 1979, after earning a B.A. in creative writing at Berkeley, Simpson dabbled in various Bay Area jobs, working as an acupuncturist's assistant (“I didn't know a thing about it. I'd turn the needles sometimes, that's all”) and writing features for the San Francisco Chronicle, the East Bay Express and other area newspapers.

EASTWARD DRIFT

Simpson eventually left the west coast to enroll in the graduate writing program at Columbia University. She wrote poetry there, then switched to fiction, placing pieces with journals like Ploughshares, Iowa Review, and the Paris Review, where she became an editor after earning her M.F.A. in 1983. Her salary at the Paris Review covered her rent but little else. “During my tenure they finally broke down and gave us health insurance” she remembers with a grin.

Struggling to pay off college loans, Simpson lived on 100th Street and West End Avenue in the same building as her friend, novelist Jonathan Dee. “I had this great landlord who was sort of a guardian angel of writers on the Upper West Side” says Simpson. She lived there for several years, eventually moving into a bigger apartment as compensation for editing her landlord's granddaughter's college entrance essay.

It was a short story that James Atlas fished out of the slush pile at the Atlantic Monthly that finally put her on the inside track. He didn't publish it, Simpson recalls, but sent it to Amanda Urban at ICA. “She called me out the blue and took me to a very fancy lunch. I remember I didn't yet have a New York coat and it was snowing. She had a fur coat.”

Four years later, Simpson says, she sent Urban a manuscript of Anywhere but Here, which had begun to germinate at Columbia, under the guidance of Elizabeth Hardwick and Richard Price. Urban sold the novel to Ann Close at Knopf for ＄15,000. Shortly thereafter, subsidized by a Guggenheim grant, she quit her job at the Paris Review to take a teaching fellowship at Princeton. It was a heady but confusing time, Simpson recalls: “Publishing any first novel is a very strange experience,” she says. “If you're long into your 20s or 30s, [a writer] feels partly like an imposter. Your parents are making excuses for you. And then to actually have a book come out, it sort of quantifies it, there's something there that wasn't there before:’

Anywhere but Here defied the laws of publishing gravity for a literary first novel, selling 25,000 copies in hardcover and close to 200,000 in paperback. The freewheeling odyssey of capricious and pipe-dreaming Adele August and her precocious, long-suffering daughter struck a nerve with readers, many of whom were riveted by the novel's opening scene, in which Adele stops on a desolate road, forces Ann out of the car and drives off, ostensibly never to return. She eventually comes back and offers to take Ann out for ice cream. “When I did readings, I often read from the beginning of the book” says Simpson. “So many people would come up and say ‘How did you know that I did that?’ Or ‘That happened to me’ After that book a lot of people confided in me.”

Critics found the raw emotion and sprawling complexity of Anywhere but Here a welcome contrast to the trendlet fiction of the mid-1980s, be it the urban psychodramas of Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis or the dirty realism of Ann Beattie and Raymond Carver. “It was less clear at the time that [minimalism] was what we were in the middle of” Simpson reflects. “In a funny way I did consider myself a minimalist. I thought my unit, in that book especially, was the line, almost more than the paragraph or the scene. I was influenced by writers like Raymond Carver in that book. But I think a lot of influences are invisible;’

Five years in the writing, the sequel to Anywhere but Here opens when Ann, in her late 20s, is flunking out of medical school in New York. She has assumed her birth name, Mayan Atassi, and grown obsessed with finding her father. When they meet, after 500 pages of detours and dead ends, it's a crushing disappointment.

Asked if writing The Lost Father was cathartic, Simpson grows standoffish. “All the books are consoling in their ways to me” she says. “I'm not as affected by the plot. I get more consolation and satisfaction from a paragraph that's just right.” While she bristles at questions about her parents, Simpson acknowledges “a lot of the feelings and themes in The Lost Father were close to my life, but not the details.”

Pressed to acknowledge just how much of her work is autobiographical, she finally blurts out with a nervous laugh, “Twenty-five percent,” then hastily changes the subject “What I'd finally say about truth and autobiography” she says, “is that all writers are probably trying to get at some core truth of life, at some configuration that is enduring and truthful. I just haven't found the truth to be my vehicle. It seems sort of disorganized and repetitive and cluttered with randomness and meaningless avenues. That's not to say I don't exclude something because it happened. Some true things do have a certain resonance and vibrancy, but lots of them don't and lots of them benefit from a complete change”

Over the years, Simpson has taken stabs at nonfiction but hasn't liked the results. “I've tried in very small forms, not to write a memoir, but a few [autobiographical] essays, and they've been disastrous. I published one about my grandmother redecorating her house in 1950 and everyone in my family called in with outrage at my inaccuracies.”

IN A DIFFERENT VOICE

A Regular Guy, edited by Gary Fisketjon at Knopf, simmered for years before it was published. “It was longer, and I actually had two characters who collapsed into one” she explains. “It also took me a while to find the third person.” Some of the early reviews have criticized Simpson's decision to abandon the intimate, first-person narrative of her first two novels for a more decorous third-person, arguing that this tale of a family unit splintered by class and self-interest might have been more vivid in Simpson's familiar first-person voice.

While the novel sacrifices the immediacy of the previous two for a more fastidious, emotional detachment, the use of the third person in fact grants Simpson a more ecumenical view of the murky questions of illegitimacy, creativity and commerce that are its focal point. Such critics also overlook the fact that Owens, like any character, is a composite.

Owens's finickiness, Simpson admits, comes from her. “I'm a vegetarian but I'm not as good as Owens. I would like to be that rigorous but I'm not.” Perhaps on some level a metaphor for Simpson's own anxieties about youthful success, Owens also smacks of Kary Mullis, the iconoclastic, boyish Nobel laureate who made a fortune from his discovery of P.C.R., a device for reproducing DNA.

Simpson doesn't deem her three novels a trilogy. Nor did she set out in her new book to recast the same story and the same rag-tag family featured in her previous two. “It's true that I haven't written a war novel or something,” she shrugs. “But what else is there but families?” Since the art of the novel “is a little bit old” she adds, “there is a sense now that it is intriguing to write about some of the more modern forms of the family that are extreme. But actually I'm interested in the more subtle things, too. I think it would be a fascinating novel to start out where Jane Austen leaves off, to start at a wedding and portray a relatively uneventful happy marriage. It's a novel I would read”

Involved in various M.E.A. programs in the past, Simpson, who was named one of Granta’s best young American novelists on the basis of the first chapter of A Regular Guy, now teaches in the fall semester at Bard College. She'll spend the rest of the year in Los Angeles. She works at home most days. As the long intervals between novels suggests, however, she has a penchant for multiple drafts and endless rewrites. She has spent the entire summer working on one short story. Writing novels, she says, is “very stabilizing. You can pretty much work every day. There's always something to do in it”

Gabriel hasn't materialized as the afternoon winds down and Simpson prepares to return to her work. The vicissitudes of parenthood are clearly a welcome distraction from the more predictable work of writing. “The nice thing about books is that you can revise them,” she says with an abashed smile. “Whereas Gabriel is only one once. I've probably made like 10,000 mistakes and he's not even three years old. You can't go back. You can't throw it out if it's not working. You can't go back and put it all in a different voice.”

Reading Simpson's fiction, however, one can't help thinking that she has gone back, and that finally, what gives her three novels their unnerving power is her determination to revisit in fiction events that have proven intractable in real life.