[In the following review of The Lost Father, Coe commends Simpson's “marvelously accomplished” writing, but concludes that the novel is excessively long and burdened with tedious digressions.]

It might seem a rather obvious point to make at the outset, but two of these novels are extremely long. Long novels make specific demands on our patience and attention, and in the end this can hardly help translating itself into a claim for their own importance: both Brightness Falls [by Jay McInerney] and The Lost Father constitute invitations to spend at least ten or twelve hours of our pressured lives listening to the voices of their authors. The physical weight of these books, then, announces their literary weightiness, but this creates formal problems for both writers. Although by the end of Mona Simpson's novel we are in no doubt as to the seriousness of her themes or her genuine gift for plot, a huge amount of the surface texture of her book is taken up with the kind of homespun detail and domestic minutiae which we associate with the American minimalist writers, and it takes a long time for the reader to become convinced that there is material here for a sustained 500-page narrative rather than a Carveresque short story. As for McInerney, we have grown so used to thinking of him as a purveyor of brittle, epigrammatic fictions that there is an immediate sense of unease in seeing his characteristic milieu, preoccupations and ironies suddenly being given the full-blown neo-Dickensian treatment. …

Mona Simpson's second novel The Lost Father offers a more daunting prospect: 500 pages locked within the confines of a single consciousness, and a dogged, unflinching preoccupation with the self, the ‘I’ of the narrator/heroine. Sometimes, I found, the reader's vision glazes over and all you can see is the vertical slash of first-person pronouns clustered across every page.

Not that the consciousness in question isn't interesting or complex. The Lost Father is a sequel to Anywhere but Here, which examined the relationship between a young girl called Mayan and her mother Adele as they drifted in and around California in search of TV stardom and decent accommodation. Now Mayan is grown up and working as a medical student in New York: but her burning ambition is to locate her father, an Egyptian named Mohammed Atassi who walked out on her family when she was very young. As long as this ambition remains unfulfilled, she is broken, fragmented: she even goes by three different names—Mayan Atassi, Mayan Stevenson and Ann Stevenson. Both the book and its central character, then, are subject to the same tension: they are torn between a strong, propulsive, forward impulse—the drive to find Mayan's lost father, which takes Mayan halfway across America, and indeed across the globe—and its opposite, an inert, paralysed state given over to nostalgia, reverie and irresolution.

Not surprisingly, Simpson's attempt to negotiate between these two different camps leads to frustration for the reader. There is something appealing about the way Mayan declines to glamorise herself: ‘I mostly stayed in my apartment at the desk with my book open under the lamplight. I drank coffee, bit the ends of my hair, memorising bones. I tried to plan rewards that would not involve calories.’ After all that time spent with McInerney's beautiful people, where every woman looks like a fashion model (often because she is a fashion model) and every man is a high achiever in single-minded pursuit of his career goals, this sort of candid admission of defeat is extremely welcome. And it is related to one of Simpson's most truthful perceptions: her insistence that people often make life-changing decisions not rationally but on the basis of whims and daydreams: ‘I'd picked New York,’ Mayan admits blithely, ‘because I had a vision of myself wearing white bucks and a pink cable-knit sweater, holding the silver subway pole.’ But there's also (remember?) a story to be told here, and from that point of view the first half of the novel is disfigured by an almost morbid tendency towards digressions, Mayan cannot witness any incident, hear any word, feel the flicker of even the most fleeting evanescent image without its triggering a lengthy flashback. The links don't have to be strong. using the telephone makes her think of other times she used the telephone (‘One time Bud Edison had woken up and walked with his arms out to where I was naked, crouched over the phone on his desk’). Going home for Christmas makes her think of other Christmases (‘One year for Christmas I told my mother I wanted nothing but to be on a TV show’). Talking about money with a travel agent leads into a passage that begins: ‘Money. Once in California, with Stevie Howard, we ate a tart made of golden raspberries, in a restaurant. He didn't particularly like it.’ Food is often central to these flashbacks: she reminisces about Mexican donuts, blueberry pancakes, cookies, black bottom pie, hot chocolate and more cookies. Of course, one of the points of the book is to show that the past is a clutter of incidental details which has to be shaken off, but Simpson offers up these fragments with an air of reverence—of the numinous, even—which the reader, straining at the narrative leash, can hardly be expected to share. ‘I had a mission here and small talk was keeping me from it. Small talk and food,’ she writes at one point. It's one of her rare moments of impatience and for once we can all wholeheartedly agree.

But eventually the narrative is allowed to get up a good head of steam, and the excitement of the final stages of the search—involving the inevitable trip to Egypt—is topped only by the exhilarating rightness of the novel's anti-climax, when Mayan does find her father and realises that she is no closer to solving the mystery which has been dogging her all her life: ‘Why you are unwanted: that is the only question. In the end, you understand, that is always the question you came here to ask, you crossed the globe for, spent years of your life, and at the same time as you see his face hearing those words in your voice, you understand too, like something falling, that this is the one question no one can ever answer you.’

Atassi himself is drawn with cool accuracy: he's a liar and a drifter with just about enough in the way of charisma and a good heart to inspire devotion in those with the bad judgment to become attached to him. One of the best twists of Simpson's emotional knife comes when Mayan is first reunited with her father and his new wife Uta: their pleasure in seeing her again is as genuine as their baffling inability to see why they should have made any effort to let her know where they are. Upstairs, their dog is locked in a bedroom. ‘Every so often the dog would scratch and whimper and Uta would say, “Aw, he's lonely for his daddy. He loves his daddy so much.”’ The irony of this—that Uta should have more sympathy for the dog than she ever had for Mayan—is not laboured: the remark itself is not even commented upon. It just hangs there, quietly shattering. The Lost Father seems worth tackling when you get to effects like this, but prospective readers should be warned that what they are getting for their money is only about two-fifths of a marvelously accomplished novel. Too much of the rest is just small talk and food.