Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Simpson’s achievement is the size of the challenge she sets herself. Once more her heroine is Ann, but rather than the alternating voices that narrate “Anywhere But Here”-those of Ann and her family-the new novel is narrated entirely by Ann, now in her late 20s. Ann’s father deserted his wife and daughter when she was very young, and she has been looking for him ever since-as a child watching hopefully for his car, and in later years paging through telephone books in search of his name in any town she happens to visit. In short, she is obsessed, and this novel is the story of that obsession, told from deep within her mind and memory. She hires detectives, hunts down people who might know him and telephones them to the point of harassment, misses so much medical school she’s suspended, runs into debt, and once forgets to eat until she’s dragged to an emergency room.
Obsessions can make thoroughly tedious reading. A long-gone deadbeat father, a bright daughter who seems to be throwing her life away in order to find him-this is a sure recipe for 500 pages of mounting irritation. But Simpson is a master of discretion, pacing and psychological drama, and she’s created a marvel. As Ann’s search intensifies, as facets of her father’s life move in and out of focus, as our knowledge of Ann’s life grows more richly textured, her obsession becomes a window onto a wide and engaging world. Eventually her search takes her to Egypt, her father’s birthplace. This section is drenched in a special light and clarity, as if her flight across thousands of miles is carrying Ann to her own future, as well as deeper into her father’s past.
More sophisticated and technically refined than “Anywhere But Here,” Simpson’s second novel lacks some of the surface charm of her first; the beginning is especially oblique. But stay with it. Once you finish this splendid book, it settles into memory like a cat curling up by the stove. It will be there for a long time.
