THE American realist Mona Simpson has set out to make the subject of dysfunctional family relationships her exclusive territory. Judging by A Regular Guy (Faber, £15.99 in UK), her interest in disengaged fathers has now become an obsession. Her debut, Anywhere But Here, published 10 years ago, and still her best novel achieved something that this new book, for all its clear-eyed efficiency, lacks or perhaps obscures real feeling.
Also missing is the intensity. But that is due to the fact that Simpson's particular style of nervy, humourless directness depends on having a first-person narrative to sustain it. Ann, the daughter in Anywhere But Here, describes in a laconic tone of continuing hurt the ordeal of life in the company of erratic, desperate Mom. Simpson's narrative voice, even at that stage marked by her characteristic precision, expresses a numb agony far more powerful than mere resentment. Simpson followed that book with The Lost Father (1992), in which Mayan, in many ways a grown-up version of Ann, agonises her way through a narrative of more than 500 pages, trying the reader's patience. It is risky to write a novel based entirely on endless litanies devoted to life's unfairness.
In fairness to Simpson, she makes it clear from the opening pages of that novel that we are in the company of a narrator with personality problems too complex to be blamed entirely on Dad. Ironically, this time Simpson draws back, and writes in the third person. But this new detachment does not quite work. The story of Jane, a 10-year-old girl despatched by her mother Mary to a father who has never acknowledged her, should be far more affecting than it is. Simpson has created several obstacles for herself, her characters and, ultimately, her readers.
Initially the novel reminds one of the work of Alice Hoffman and Louise Erdrich. Mary, who at 19 had been rejected by her boyfriend Owens when she became pregnant, has cared for their daughter alone and in poverty, but now feels it is time to send the child to a father who has become wealthy. Jane is prepared for her journey in the form of a bizarre initiation ritual reminiscent of a young warrior being groomed for battle - except that her rite includes being taught to drive. "She stopped going to school ... Mary fitted pillows to the seat, sewing telephone books in between padding and basting on a slipcover, so Jane sat IS inches above the cracked vinyl. They had to strap wood blocks to the brake and gas and clutch pedals, so Jane's feet could reach. But the blocks slid and they couldn't trust the straps and they finally borrowed a drill from the Shell station and attached the wood with deep barnum screws."
Mary's teaching technique includes making Jane drive with her eyes closed, "which was like swimming in rain". It is outlandish, yet the odyssey which brings the 10-year-old from a commune somewhere in the Pacific North West to the unreality of her father's Silicon Valley empire is curiously touching. Fulfilling her quest, the child acquires a mythic status: "she drove a long simple road. Her mother's pencil-drawn map lay on the seat next to her. She was travelling west, with an old sense of which way west was."
The heroism does not last. Jane is not an endearing nor even developed character. Far too street-wise to convince as a wronged innocent, Jane never wins our sympathy. Instead, Mary, does. Mary, pathetic but loving, never relaxes her love for Owens, the man who abandoned her. She clings to her past, and often when speaking with Jane tends to offer opinions which were his. Refusing to accept his indifference, she believes that in addition to deciding about Jane they must decide about "Mary and Owens". She persists with this despite her awareness of being invisible when with Owens and Jane in the company of his current girlfriend, the increasingly insecure Olivia.
AS with her two previous novels, A Regular Guy is longer than it needs to be. Very little happens. Mary and Jane move to the edges of Owens's world, but they never really enter his life, which continues in its mindlessly self-absorbed way. "He was a man too busy to flush toilets," announces the opening sentence. "More than most people Jane had known, he was oblivious to the issuance from his own body that might offend." Simpson is careful to avoid any possibility of misinterpreting Owens's personality. Fiction has had its share of villains, but Owens is an unusually effective, subtle portrait of an utterly thoughtless character. For all his money, won through the success of a genetic mutation idea, he remains the selfish, good-looking kid who has never acquired any human qualities and remains convinced everything can be solved by a cheque, or eased with a casual smile.
The main characters revolve around him" and his whims like minor satellites. Owens, is repulsive, despite his alleged charms. He clumsily suggests to Mary that she sleep with a crippled friend of his: "Just think what you'd be giving him." Her outraged reaction unsettles him: "Okay, okay. I just thought you could do a really good turn, that's all." When watching him deliver a speech, Jane sees him hovering on the brink, of exposure as a tough question seems as if it will undermine him. Of course, he survives, and his daughter's reaction is interesting. "It amazed Jane that though she'd felt a point in her heart like a splinter when he was on the verge of failing, now that he'd succeeded she was left feeling not victorious but chagrined."
The relationship which eventually develops between Owens and Jane fails to convince. Perhaps this is the strength of the book: Simpson is dealing with real life. But A Regular Guy, as uneven as life itself, loses much of its potential force through the sheer exactness of the narrative and, most of all, because of the new detachment Simpson has brought to this book at the expense of the no-holds-barred intensity which sustained, her earlier work.
