SOURCE: “A Daddy Fixation,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 9, 1992, pp. 3, 7.

In the following review of The Lost Father, Eder praises the novel's “rich human comedy,” but finds shortcomings in the protagonist's narrow self-examination and the book's excessive length and slow pace.

Chase after the white whale and you can end up with tuna fish. The young narrator and protagonist in Mona Simpson's second novel bleeds her life into a search for her runaway father; until she finds him, and he's nothing special.

If life is a journey rather than a destination, a single-minded purpose becomes an evasion. That is the theme. The child in Simpson's first book, Anywhere but Here, who is taken by her scatty mother to Hollywood to become a star, is grown up now, and a medical student in New York. But she has never gotten over that first flight imposed on her...