SOURCE: “Anywhere but Here,” in Hudson Review, Vol. XL, No. 2, Summer, 1987, pp. 313-22.

In the following excerpt, Flower offers praise for Anywhere but Here.

Fine as [Peter] Taylor's novel [A Summons to Memphis] is, there's an even better book to put everything aside for and read at once: Mona Simpson's long, funny, racy, passionately detailed study of an ambitious mother who drags her daughter off to Hollywood to seek the American Dream [in Anywhere but Here.] Adele is a fugitive from the Midwest, a place called Bay City, Wisconsin, and a veteran of two reckless marriages (one to an Iranian college professor, the other to a sleek ice-skating instructor). She is also a victim of every fashion magazine's image of what a woman should look like in order to snare Mr. Right. “Anywhere but here” is where she relentlessly dreams of being, and at the end of the...