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

Tom Owens is “a man too busy to flush toilets.” A rich entrepreneur who gives his biotech companies biblical names, a potential politician who wants to shake up the state school system, he is so legendary that people gossip about his girlfriends with the same awe and titillation which the ancient Greeks must have felt when they described Zeus’ affairs with mortal women. In his arrogance and power, his belief that he can ignore the moral code of ordinary people, he resembles two other American heroes: Citizen Kane and Jay Gatsby. Like Kane, he is obsessed with his origins, with the mother he never knew. Perhaps this explains his interest in “sequencing the human genome,” in discovering the structure of human identity. Like Gatsby, he is self-made, has never met a woman who can satisfy some impossible vision of love and is misunderstood because he does not know himself. But he is no tragic hero destroyed by his blindness, his excesses, his hubris. In the end, like most mortals, he learns to live with his failures. When the company he so lovingly built up rejects him, he becomes a “new man” devoted to his wife and children.

Yet his is not the only, or even the most significant, story in this complex novel [A Regular Guy] about the circles within circles of friends and families. Owens's community includes his illegitimate daughter, Jane, who can never be sure of his love; her mother, Mary, a perennial hippie who has not learned to demand her portion of eternity; his girlfriend, Olivia, who tries to be as good as she is beautiful; and Noah, a brilliant scientist so dedicated to his work with genes, so determined to be independent, that he turns down Owens's offer of a million dollars and a job in his company. Noah is Owens's alter ego, the tortoise to his hare. Although he is disabled and earns only a modest salary, in the end he has everything Owens lacks: integrity, his work, a passionate and enduring love.

All these characters live in and around a northern California university town, a utopia of charming old houses, cafés and high-tech industry. It is a utopia which Owens searches for, while others struggle with what they find around them. He shares Gatsby's fatal idealism. Since he will never find perfection in the real world, he allows his mansion to crumble, belittles his lover and seems to forget about his daughter. He may fantasize about his origins, but he is no superman; he cannot, in the end, live the American dream of self-sufficiency, because he needs his friends and family. His work, and even his daughter, belong to this charmed circle. Jane is Noah's surrogate baby, everyone's “soft-fingered” child, and she becomes what Owens could never be, a free spirit completely at home in her community.

It is through Jane and her relationship with her mother that the story truly comes alive. Simpson, whose first novel, Anywhere but Here, was a powerful study of a daughter struggling to break free of her disturbed mother, understands the blood bond, the unrelenting love between mothers and daughters. Although it is difficult to believe a mother, even one as harebrained as Mary, would teach her ten-year-old daughter to drive and then send her off alone in an old truck to find her father, the chapter in which this takes place is the most compelling part of the novel. For Mary, a single mother with no money or resources, her daughter's journey, like a cry for help disguised as suicide, becomes for one mad moment the answer to her desperation. After Jane reaches Owens and Mary follows, the book begins to falter, and the writing lacks Simpson's usual intensity, the sharpness of her other work.

Perhaps the problem is with the character of Owens, who has neither the mystery and sadness of Gatsby, nor the terrible majesty of Kane. Nothing he says is remarkable, and his obsessions with diet and education seem indulgent rather than original, his love-life typical of a man afraid to commit himself to one woman. We have to wade through a rather cumbersome narrative to see Owens transformed into “a regular guy,” yet we never believed even for a moment that he was a mythological figure; he is just too ordinary, too boring, too irritating. His personality is not large enough to compensate for the flatness, the odd complacency of the writing. It is as if Simpson assumes that we already know his world, his California cocoon; scientific references are dropped into the text like afterthoughts, and the characters are described in vague terms: the beautiful Olivia, the pretty Julie. In the end, the novel becomes as unreal to us as the American dream appears to Tom Owens.