Tinseled Towns

A stunning novel of dashed dreams

Anywhere but Here (Knopf) is one of the saddest stories I've ever read. Told in the multiple voices of a midwestem family— the beautiful, sullen Ann, her neurotic mother, Adele, her aunt, and her grandmother— Mona Simpson's first novel is a book about dreams that never happen. Ann's mother wants her to be a movie star, and drops everything to head out West. Their only possessions are a Lincoln Continental they haven't paid for and a credit card purloined from Adele's husband, an ice-skating instructor in a nowhere Wisconsin town. In L.A., mother and daughter inhabit a succession of crummy apartments, so poor they're reduced to gobbling frozen dates out of the freezer and having dinner at Baskin-Robbins. They bounce checks. They shoplift. They leave their dirty clothes in a pile. "We still didn't have a hamper," Ann notes in her cool, dispassionate voice. "It was another thing, like ice cube trays, that other people always had."

Simpson has an uncanny eye for detail, for the look and texture of things. The places, not surprisingly, are drawn from her own life: Los Angeles is depicted with a cartographer's exactitude, and the desolate, one-street towns are as realized as the backcountry of Bobbie Ann Mason and Jayne Anne Phillips—a world of people who stayed behind.

Nothing is lost on Simpson, but she never condemns her characters; she's a witness, not a judge. There's a scene in the book where Ann's mother drags her off to Las Vegas for an assignation with the father who abandoned them, a waiter who squanders his meager earnings at the tables. In a hurry to jump in bed with him, Adele gives her daughter a cold, appraising glance, "as if she were trying to judge whether I was young enough to forget things I didn't understand. She sighed, finally deciding it wouldn't matter." A big mistake.

JAMES ATLAS