SOURCE: “Two Short Novels That Vary in Their Breadth and Depth of Focus,” in Chicago Tribune Books, November 26, 2000, p. 1.

In the following review, Cheuse offers a positive assessment of Off Keck Road.

The short form doesn't always go hand in hand with the long view. Short novels usually focus on a particular incident or scene and treat it with more fullness than a short story does, adding characters, investigating immediate situations at greater depth. But when they explore in time what they compress in length, the results can sometimes be spectacular.

In her latest work of fiction, the accomplished Mona Simpson chooses time over length, and the results are moving. Off Keck Road places her squarely in the tradition of such masters of the material of the bounded life of the Middle West as Willa Cather and Sherwood Anderson.

The book opens in Green Bay during winter 1956, when...