SOURCE: “A Victim of the Times,” in Times Literary Supplement, May 22, 1992, p. 28.

In the following review, Beevor offers a favorable assessment of The Lost Father.

Mona Simpson has a lot to live up to after the success of Anywhere but Here (1987), a modern American Bildungsroman, which also jumped back and forth across three generations. The Lost Father is the sequel to that story.

In the first novel, the adolescent Ann is taken from the security of her grandmother by her reckless mother, Adele. The two of them set out from Bay City, Wisconsin, for California, by road. Adele has set her heart on Ann's becoming a child television star. Adele, the mother, is one of the walking wounded of the Great American Dream. With hope still triumphing over experience and the ageing process, she remains hooked on the fantasy that Mr Right will appear in a shining car...