[In the following excerpt, Kelley finds shortcomings in the structure and narrative voice of Anywhere but Here.]

In all these first novels (except for Rope-Dancer, a short-story collection [by M.J. Fitzgerald]) by women, the sins of mothers—and their sorrows—are visited upon their children. Each female protagonist has to escape her mother's power in order to discover her own. But that struggle necessarily involves, as each woman faces maturity herself, some conflicted understanding of her mother's sufferings and mistakes. Ambivalence about the past runs deep in these narratives and adulterates the women's achievement of selfhood. …

Mona Simpson's Anywhere but Here unfolds a destructive mother-daughter relationship too, but Ann August, the daughter suffering from the curse of her mother's possessive neurosis, does grow up, and her struggle takes place in a more familiar and realistic terrain than Coriola's [in Fitzgerald's Concertina]. In spite of some technical lapses, the novel achieves and sustains one remarkable effect: Ann's ambivalence about her mother Adele, whose craziness is only gradually and partially revealed, remains taut throughout the book. Adele's power over Ann, who cannot stop loving her, remains in force until just before the end, sustaining the novel's tensions.

The technical problems in the book have to do partly with structure, partly with voice. Structurally the book is lopsided, with all the excitement in the first half. The sections where Adele and Ann travel to California to find stardom in Hollywood have the vagrant excitement of a female On the Road. But in the second half, when Ann engages in a protracted adolescent struggle with her mother, the novel slows down. The second difficulty, that of voice, affects the narrative's authenticity. Although several women narrate the book along with Ann—her grandmother, aunt, and mother—the only voice that rings true is Ann's. Simpson seems to suggest that Ann is interviewing her relatives, writing a roots book, instead of letting the characters live.

The title comes from Emerson: “There are three wants which can never be satisfied; that of the rich wanting more, that of the sick, wanting something different, and that of the traveler, who says, ‘anywhere but here’.” In some ways, Simpson makes Adele a female incarnation of the American spirit, infused with Emersonian optimism and drive. But at the same time Adele is a compulsive consumer of tired ideas, and if she represents an American spirit, it's the desire to shop around. As far as Simpson takes this notion—that is, to the gulches of Los Angeles—it gives the novel a certain cultural perspective. But the problem for both Ann and Anywhere but Here is that there isn't much world outside the two main characters. Ann has nowhere to turn for help. There are no effectual or reliable men in the book, nor is there a larger social structure, except the distant world of college and independence. Ann and Adele live in a car; they are unbearably isolated from others and dependent upon each other.