SOURCE: “Beautiful People,” in London Review of Books, July 23, 1992, p. 22-23.

In the following review of The Lost Father, Coe commends Simpson's “marvelously accomplished” writing, but concludes that the novel is excessively long and burdened with tedious digressions.

It might seem a rather obvious point to make at the outset, but two of these novels are extremely long. Long novels make specific demands on our patience and attention, and in the end this can hardly help translating itself into a claim for their own importance: both Brightness Falls [by Jay McInerney] and The Lost Father constitute invitations to spend at least ten or twelve hours of our pressured lives listening to the voices of their authors. The physical weight of these books, then, announces their literary weightiness, but this creates formal problems for both writers. Although by the end of Mona Simpson's novel we are in no doubt...