ANYWHERE BUT HERE

by Mona Simpson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 14, 1986

Simpson's fictional debut, no doubt intended as an oddly touching tale of a romantically neurotic woman, catalogues in sordid detail that same woman's truly disturbing behavior--her pathological relations with her mother, sister, and daughter, all of whom speak here at length in the similar, flat cadences of their native Midwest. When Adele August finally gets in a word edgewise, in the last few pages of this rambling and anecdotal novel, she's well beyond redemption. Her final bit of West Coast psychobabble is self-serving, to say the least, a pathetic apology for a lifetime of lies and deceptions. Her daughter, Ann, the main narrator here, chronicles her mother's manias, compulsions, and vanities with a deadpan weariness that seems to mask a genuine horror. It's left to her long-suffering and plain-speaking grandmother, Lillian, to sum up Adele--""she wasn't quite all there."" And that partly explains why Adele drags nine-year-old daughter Ann with her cross-country in an unpaid-for Lincoln, California-dreaming all the way. Unhappy with her job as a teacher, her second husband, and pretty much everything else about Bay City, Wisconsin, Adele hopes ""to catch us a man"" out West and see Ann become a star, the latter a pipe dream fed only by Adele's hyperactive imagination. After more years of living beyond their means, frazzled mother and embarrassed daughter find themselves down and out in Beverly Hills, broke, hungry, and lonely. More a cut-and-paste assemblage of memories than a well-plotted novel, the disjointed and open-ended narrative wanders through time and place, filling in the ugly particulars of Adele's malfeasance, with Ann providing numerous pseudo-insights (""Our conversations were always like that, like lighting single matches."" ""You remember the places you've lost to""). By the time you finish this overly long, warts-and-all family portrait, you just might wish, as the title inadvertently suggests, that you'd been somewhere else all along.

Pub Date: Jan. 14, 1986

ISBN: 0679737383

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1986

Categories: FICTION