[In the following review, Birkerts offers a positive evaluation of Anywhere but Here.]

In the opening scene of Mona Simpson's Anywhere but Here, 12-year-old Ann August stands at the edge of a flat Western highway, watching with growing panic as her mother's white Continental turns into a dot on the horizon. Car and mother will reappear, but only after the girl is convinced that this time they are gone forever. For Adele, the mother, is an engineer of histrionic effects: she is willing to put Ann through the terrors of abandonment again and again in order to offer her the miracle of rescue.

Adele and Ann are on their way to California. Adele is in flight from a collapsed marriage and a constricting life in Bay City, Wis. Young, pretty, dissatisfied—she pilots her Continental like a bus of dreams. Ann will be a child star in the movies; luxury and love will carry the day. In the meantime, they must do what they can to survive. Ann sweet-talks free produce from truck drivers, Adele charges meals and motels on a credit card filched from her ex. A psychologist would probably describe the relations between mother and daughter as “symbiotic.” In Adele's case, she would note a problem with boundaries; she does not know where she leaves off and her daughter begins.

Ann is shrewd, though, and no less a survivor than her mother. She recognizes the problem and the eventual solution: “I must have looked pale standing there, because she pushed some lipstick over my lips. They were chapped and I wouldn't stand still, so she smeared a little and licked her finger to clean the edge of my mouth. I ran over to the sink and spit.

“I felt something then, as I stood watching my spit twirl down the drain. I want to get away from her. There was nowhere I could go. I was twelve. She'd have me six more years.”

Anywhere but Here is the story of those six years. But it is not a linear narrative. Ann's account is broken up by a series of digressions into the past, some in her own voice, others in the voices of Carol, Adele's older sister, and Lillian, their mother. Against the chronicle of Adele's scheming—for jobs, clothes, apartments, social connections, and men—and the non-stop friction between a deeply enmeshed mother and daughter, emerges a more substantive picture of the generations of August women. Adele's character, we see, did not emerge out of nowhere.

Simpson's novel achieves its force not so much through plotting as through the steady accumulation of sharply drawn scenes. In less skilled hands, such narration could easily become shapeless and repetitious. But Simpson has a sure instinct for the flash points of love and rage in her characters and she soft-pedals nothing. Though Anywhere but Here is Simpson's first novel, she has already earned a place beside domestic pioneers like Anne Tyler and Alice Munro. She has not only shaken the family tree, she has plucked it from its soil to expose its tangled system of roots.