Off Keck Road

October 2, 2000
Simpson (Anywhere But Here) casts her net lightly over the reader in her fourth, uncharacteristically slim work of fiction, a novella, attempting to engage with a quiet plot about emotionally passive protagonists and the risk of staying disconnected. The narrative follows the lives of three women from 1956 to the present in Green Bay, Wis. Bea Maxwell, a practical, efficient woman, seems to have inherited the steadfast, can-do traits of earlier Midwestern heroines found in the landscapes of Willa Cather. The quintessential overachiever in high school, Bea is equally successful during a brief stint working for an advertising agency in Chicago. In terms of love or any risky emotional connection, however, Bea is somehow missing the boat, apparently by choice. She easily gives up her job and returns to Green Bay when her mother contracts rheumatoid arthritis. Once home, she is drawn to June Umberhum, a college friend who grew up off Keck Road. June has returned from an early marriage and is raising a daughter. Always a bit of a town rebel, June puts forth an effort to taste life, while Bea's desires remain submerged. Also telescoped into the neighborhood scene is Shelley, a Keck Road girl who contracted a mild case of polio as a child. The connections between these three women are gentle and unforced. They pass through the years in the eddies of their own interiors as their community expands around them, but the narrative hovers more than it grips. Simpson's signature fine writing renders subtle quirks of character gently and realistically, and she again finds fresh ways of capturing the familiar. Readers who enjoy the "day-in-the-average-life" tales of Anne Tyler will find a similar tone here. The appeal of Simpson's previous books should elicit a good initial response to this one, and her somewhat subdued plot structure may attract readers eager for reflective fiction. 40,000 first printing.

June 1, 2000
This slender little tale relates the story of Bea Maxwell, who stays rooted in the Wisconsin town where she grew up, and the ups and downs of her friends and family.

Copyright 2000 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2000
Simpson's previous novels, including her best-loved book, " Any"where but Here (1986), chronicle quests and odysseys. Her newest, and most concentrated, is all about staying put. In the opening scene, her heroine, dutiful doctor's daughter Bea, comes home to Green Bay, Wisconsin, on winter break from school in 1956 and goes to pick up a friend, June Umberhum, who lives on Keck Road amid a cluster of rundown houses just outside the city limits. As Bea watches children running wild in the brilliant snow, she feels as though she's looking at a painting, "a Brueghel sparked to life." This moment is full of promise, which is both smothered and fulfilled in unforeseen ways over the course of this muted tale of four squeezed decades of small-town life, unexpected friendships, lowered expectations, and ritualized everydayness. Both Bea and June move back home after their brief forays out into the wider world: Bea to care for her ill mother, who frets that she did too good a job scaring her wholesome daughter away from men, and June to raise her daughter on her own. Then there's the indomitable Shelley, also of Keck Road, the last of the town's denizens to contract polio, and Bill, a wealthy, jazz-loving, and ebullient man who brings zest to their lives. As Simpson weaves together their meshed stories just like Bea knits her sweaters and throws, she pauses often to contemplate the beauty of the land as its disappears beneath the hard edges of subdivisions and malls, an internment emblematic of how love is buried deep in the hearts of her modest but strong characters, figures profound in their rootedness and dignity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2000, American Library Association.)