SOURCE: “Unexamined Lives,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 26, 2000, p. 5.

In the following review of Off Keck Road, Frank commends Simpson's presentation of female bonds and social constraints, but concludes that the author attempts too much in a short space, resulting in a work that is underdeveloped.

With Off Keck Road, her new novella, Mona Simpson makes a notable departure from the big, bulky, vibrant novels that established her as an individual and compelling voice in contemporary fiction. In this triad of books—Anywhere but Here, The Lost Father, and A Regular Guy—Simpson produces a contemporary version of what Henry James, speaking of the Victorian novels of the generation preceding his, called “loose baggy monsters.” In Simpson's case, what the novels lack in rigor, structure and discipline, they often more than make up in a kind of emotive largeness, a willingness to go deeply and relentlessly...