[In the following review, Fichtner offers a positive assessment of Off Keck Road.]

Out where the four-lane highway narrows, where the malls and groomed subdivisions fade into trailer parks, canning plants and salvage yards, the little cluster of buckshot-scarred mailboxes is the landmark to watch for, the spot where you slam into low gear and turn off into Keck Road. Anyone who grew up, as this reader did, in the 1950s in a not-so-big town of Chevy-dealership and feed-store ambitions, remembers a place like this. Whatever you called it, Keck Road always meant boxy houses surrounded by dandelion yards wiggly with lean dogs and beautiful, smudgy children whose mothers did not shrink into corners when their husbands stumbled home from a double shift at the tannery or too many beers at the Walk Right Inn.

Keck Road was the frontier, the yonder, the place beyond the railroad tracks, beyond the last bus stop, almost beyond imagining, unless, of course, you lived there.

Bea, the doctor's daughter home for the holidays, does not live anywhere near Keck Road, but on this cold morning driving out there to pick up a college chum, she rolls down the window of her new red Oldsmobile and pokes her head out, charmed: “The houses looked small and hastily built, but the land out here was magnificent. … A Norway spruce was half again as tall as the tree in front of City Hall, the one lit with candles at the annual Monk's Charity Carol on Christmas Eve.

“Sun glittered on crusted snow, a forbidding brightness.”

A similar gleam infuses Mona Simpson's lovely, rueful and uncharacteristically compact new effort [Off Keck Road], which spans almost five decades in the lives of two memorable women. One is Bea. The other, a generation younger, is Shelley from Keck Road. Both are blessed with spunk and intelligence, but for years they are no more than vaguely aware of each other and have almost nothing in common except sturdy physiques, their shared status as social outsiders, their common heritage of small-town pieties and family duties and their yearnings for what Bea calls “[t]hat old elusive happiness.”

The psychological dramas of domestic dissonance long have been Simpson territory, of course. “We fought,” begins her acclaimed 1986 debut, Anywhere but Here. That fierce, breathtaking mother-daughter epic flowed on crosscurrents of freedom and rootlessness, devotion and suffocation, love and duplicity, and its sequel, The Lost Father, examined the defining power of that parent's absence, “vague and large as the sky.” These were novels about risks and choices, about the repercussions that beset those who expect too much from the rumble of their lives. But they also were idiosyncratic travelogues that dragged readers across state lines, into foreign countries and through the less well-mapped geographies of the spirit and the will.

By contrast, Off Keck Road is set entirely in and around Green Bay, Wis., where Simpson was born, and centers on characters who, for the most part, have stayed put. In these pages, Green Bay comes across as timeless and familiar, an Everyplace in which the civic tempo reassuringly thrums with petty biases and gossip about imploding marriages and how many of the Davis girls lost their virginity to that blond boy from the dairy farm. It is the sort of town in which nothing-and everything-happens, where the big news is not the Packers’ latest victory but the drive-in movie's Friday night fish fry and the morning's big surprise: the bottle of spiked homemaker eggnog a friend has left by your back door in the snow.

When the book opens, that day Bea drives out to Keck Road, it is 1956. Five years later, Shelley will come down with polio, the only Green Bay child to catch it. Mercifully, it is only a light case, “as if a feather had brushed her with the sharp edges of each tiny thread, so fine were its marks and traces. Only one leg from the shin down, mostly the foot. And her mouth dragged a little, too, on the left.” But when the neighborhood children and her brothers and sister devise a stupid little game called Polio, they make her be it.

In her own way, Bea is it, too. Less beautiful and favored than her older sister, Bea is everyone's ballast, so sensible, so socially committed, so willing to give up her big-city career dreams to help care for her arthritic mother, so—well—good. Too good, maybe. Too good for Green Bay. Too good for her own good.

By layering each woman's story through short, understated scenes, Simpson neatly manages to telescope time: friendship, sex, failure, misunderstanding, squandered chances and death all occur here without much ceremony or elaboration: “When her mother died, for a long time Bea kept busy,” we are told as casually as if this news were being conveyed by the woman standing behind us in the grocery check-out line. Oh, and by the way, that thing between Shelley and George Umberhum, “Shelley started it. She was the one.”

Still, such straightforwardness does not dull our understanding of the depth and intensity of the women's lives and of the ways they connect—or do not—with those around them. And despite the book's brevity, Simpson's appealing cast of secondary characters—in particular Bea's sparky mother Hazel and Bill Alberts, the jazz-besotted Realtor who becomes the unexpected link between Shelley and Bea—are remarkably fleshed and satisfying.

A persistent image throughout is of Bea, needles snapping, knitting scarves and capes for young polio victims, sweaters for herself, snoods for her mother, “new home” throws for the young couples to whom she sells houses. Off Keck Road may lack the impressive heft and scope of Simpson's first two novels, but it reiterates her grasp of the huge, tangled skein of the human experience and her skill at weaving into her characters and readers alike a reverence for life's great cravings: to be useful and to be loved.