SOURCE: “Money Can't Buy You Love,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 6, 1996, p. 2.

In the following review of A Regular Guy, Eder finds shortcomings in the novel's flat characters and tenuous plot.

Tom Owens, a laid-back bio-tech whiz kid, has parlayed a home-made experiment with artificial proteins into the Genesis Corp., employing 1,000 people and listed on the Fortune 500. Tom, a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs-like fictional character, made a vast fortune; 50 of his early employees and former friends became millionaires.

The “former” is a key. As in her previous novels, The Lost Father and Anywhere but Here, Mona Simpson treats of an absent father and an abandoned daughter. Absence makes a father huge. In A Regular Guy, Simpson extends the thought by turning it around. Tom Owens’ hugeness makes him absent: both to his daughter, Jane, and to those who once sat around with him brainstorming and...