©1996, ProMotion, inc.
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Review by Anna Garris Goiser
With the intriguing opening line, "He was a man too busy to flush toilets," Mona Simpson embarks on her third exploration into the Bizarro World dimension of the emotionally dyslexic American nuclear family and presents the reader with another of her staggeringly original child protagonists -- 10-year-old Jane, born to one of Simpson's more magnificently flaky mothers in a remote Oregon commune.
Jane's father, Tom Owens, the oblivious guy who doesn't flush and a Harvard dropout, inadvertently contributed to her creation. When Jane's mother, Mary, informed him of her situation, "he made it clear that her condition held no enchantment." Owens was obsessed with starting up what was to be a revolutionary company, Genesis, and had no time for Mary or any desire to be a parent. Jane lived a nomadic life with her mother, moving from commune to commune, growing up in a curious state of benign neglect and arcane knowledge into an oddly feral, precocious, ignorant, worldly, naive, independent creature with an indomitable spirit and greater emotional strength than either parent.
In the meantime, Owens has become a Bill Gates-class entrepreneur, who, despite his Midas touch with business, is as incomplete a personality as Mary. The surrounding personalities of Owens' closest friend Noah Kaskie and his girlfriend Olivia integrate with his to create a closer-to-whole human awareness, but it is only when Jane drives herself into his life, and is later joined by Mary, that Owens begins to sense the gaping black holes in his life. Jane is a force not to be denied -- she is determined to have a family of some sort, and she is more than willing to commit to loving and accepting her highly unconventional and oddly fragile parents.
Simpson's prose sears indelible images into one's mind. She never says in ten words what she can nail to one's heart with five, and her maturity and talent are prodigious. Her debut novel, Anywhere But Here, was a critical success, and her second, The Lost Father, demonstrated she could repeat the performance. With A Regular Guy, Mona Simpson settles in as a serious talent of consistently dazzling quality here for the long run.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.