SOURCE: “Family Ties, Family Lies,” in Macleans, Vol. 109, No. 48, November 25, 1996, p. 124.

In the following review, Timson offers an unfavorable assessment of A Regular Guy.

American novelist Mona Simpson has produced some extraordinary writing about the pain that difficult or delinquent parents can inflict on a child. In her first novel, Anywhere but Here (1986), she brilliantly captured the raw emotional life of an erratic mother and her vulnerable daughter, while in her second, more uneven book, The Lost Father (1992), she portrayed a distraught young woman in search of the father who had deserted her. Now, in her third novel, A Regular Guy, Simpson presents what is for her an unusual tableau—father, mother and daughter together on the same page—although they appear in nothing so ordinary as a conventional family.

Father is Tom Owens, a rich and famous young entrepreneur who goes after what he wants, never panders...