[In the following review, Timson offers an unfavorable assessment of A Regular Guy.]

American novelist Mona Simpson has produced some extraordinary writing about the pain that difficult or delinquent parents can inflict on a child. In her first novel, Anywhere but Here (1986), she brilliantly captured the raw emotional life of an erratic mother and her vulnerable daughter, while in her second, more uneven book, The Lost Father (1992), she portrayed a distraught young woman in search of the father who had deserted her. Now, in her third novel, A Regular Guy, Simpson presents what is for her an unusual tableau—father, mother and daughter together on the same page—although they appear in nothing so ordinary as a conventional family.

Father is Tom Owens, a rich and famous young entrepreneur who goes after what he wants, never panders to the needs of others (“unusual in a man who had political aspirations,” Simpson writes) and manages to be oblivious to the resentment he engenders in the people—mainly women—who revolve around him. He is not exactly a selfish monster, he is just, well, a regular guy (or so the title suggests) who does not take emotional responsibility for his actions. Long ago, he abandoned his girlfriend, Mary, when she became pregnant. Or, as his best friend, Noah, wryly puts it, he “slept with a woman, then tried to get her to go away. And that was what made men fathers and men in this world.”

Mary, a rather bewildered latter-day hippie, has raised their daughter, Jane, alone for 10 years but can no longer cope with being a poor, single mother living in an Oregon commune. Desperate and tired, Mary decides that Owens should now take care of Jane. In a chapter that is both oddly compelling and not quite believable, Mary sends Jane, at the age of 10, driving a pickup truck by herself (with blocks of wood attached to the pedals) up over the mountains to be with her father. After being found like a turnip in his garden, Jane, who has lived a wild, undisciplined life, must now try to get her father to love her. It takes a while before he is truly bitten by the father bug.

In chapters that function more like separate episodic interludes than a cohesive narrative, Jane grows up as the wise child at the centre of an odd assortment of people: her mother (whom Owens has sent for, so that the two can live near but not with him), her father, his current girlfriend, Olivia, various other women, and Noah, a scientist who is physically disabled but much healthier emotionally than Owens.

The story is told from many—too many—points of view. But the focus is always on Owens, with every other character falling into the trap of reacting to or obsessing about this unsympathetic hero. Owens is not such a regular guy after all. (Perhaps if he were, he would be more sympathetic.) He has wealth, quirky romantic urges, political ambitions and business ups and downs—all outsized characteristics, which should make him a flawed but fascinating protagonist. Yet somehow he never seems large enough or interesting enough.

With a flash of insight here, a description of character there, A Regular Guy does zero in on various truths about men, women and the families that happen to them. But the result is still a novel that doesn't quite hit home.