The Joys and Sorrows of Staying Put

More than a year ago, in the middle of writing her fourth major novel, Mona Simpson, 43, took some time off to write a novella, “Off Keck Road.”

She sent a draft to her editor at Knopf, Gary Fisketjon, who wanted to publish it on the spot. Simpson wasn’t so sure; the novella was a departure from her other books in both size and subject matter, and she’d been planning to include it in a collection of shorter works.

Fisketjon wasn’t so equivocal. Last spring, Simpson received a copy of Knopf’s fall catalog and discovered that “Off Keck Road” was listed among the offerings--never mind that there wasn’t even a contract at that point. Outfoxed, Simpson capitulated; she again set aside work on her ambitious novel-in-progress, “My Hollywood,” and gave “Off Keck Road” a good polish. The book was published last month.

Simpson’s first three published novels, “Anywhere But Here,” “The Lost Father” and “A Regular Guy,” are extensive meditations on the nature of family. Where these books are deep forays into family and the first two have journeys at their core, the novella is a rumination on place and staying put.

“Off Keck Road” follows the lives of three unmarried women in Green Bay, Wis., for almost 40 years. Simpson’s three main characters are not held in place by the conventional ties of marriage and children. Bea, a privileged college-educated career woman, leaves her job at a Chicago ad agency and returns to Green Bay to care for her ailing mother. Bea becomes an avid Realtor and, seemingly immune to romance, flirts with her boss, goes to movies with a priest, knits coveted afghans, and relies emotionally on an ongoing, deeply satisfying conversation with her friend June Umberhum.

June, also educated but less affluent than Bea, has returned to Green Bay with her daughter Peggy after the breakup of her marriage. Cramped by the limited options in Green Bay, she will eventually leave again.

Finally, there’s Shelley, who was one of the unlucky few to contract polio from the vaccine; her subsequent limp marginalizes her, but also liberates her. Nourished by a grandmother’s focused love, physically strong and unsentimental, Shelley’s directness and abrupt Midwestern locutions pepper “Off Keck Road” with small, pleasurable shocks.

Simpson was born in Los Angeles and graduated from Beverly Hills High School, but much of her early childhood was spent in Green Bay, her mother’s home. I have known Mona since she moved back to Los Angeles from New York about five years ago. She and her husband, Richard Appel, a writer-producer for the Fox TV show “King of the Hill,” and their two children, Gabriel, 7, and Grace, 9 months, live in Santa Monica.

This interview was conducted mostly by e-mail; Simpson was in Santa Monica and I was out of town.

Question: You’re working on your fourth novel. How did it happen that you produced a novella in the midst of such a major, absorbing project?

Answer: The novella was one of those books more or less “given” to me. It was comparatively easy and a pleasure.

Q: In a season with several slim novels on the shelves-- Denis Johnson’s “The Name of the World” is 130 pages; Mark Salzman’s “Lying Awake” is 180--”Off Keck Road,” with its 168 pages, 40-year time span and broad emotional canvas, surely might’ve been dubbed a novel. Was there a reason for calling it a novella?

A: I tend to write very long novels and I could tell that “Off Keck Road” was not the same thing, in the same way that I definitely have the sense that “A Simple Heart” by Flaubert, even though it covers a woman’s entire life and death, is not the same as “Madame Bovary.” Similarly, with Tolstoy, who wrote such large, ambitious novels, it’s clear that “A Happy Married Life” (also translated as “Family Happiness”) is not a Tolstoy novel. Writing this book felt different from writing a novel. Maybe it was too pleasurable.

Q: Speaking of Tolstoy, in the process of writing “Off Keck Road,” you were working on an introduction to the Modern Library edition of “Anna Karenina.” What traces and intimations of Tolstoy found their way into “Off Keck Road?”

A: There’s a scene where Levin’s brother almost proposes to Varenka on the mushroom hunt, and then he doesn’t, and for no good conclusive reason, which leaves you with this lingering feeling of what if? What if things had gone a few degrees to the right, a few degrees to the left, and the two had ended up together? I thought of this scene when I had my character Bea miss out on a similar moment. I wanted to maintain that sense of ambiguity, that a situation could’ve been different if a single moment had gone a different way.

Q: Also, as you were finishing “Off Keck Road,” you were very busy with caring for a new baby. (Grace was born in February.) How did that impact your writing life?

A: I get asked that a lot. And something makes me think that they aren’t asking Saul Bellow that question!

Q: The reviews and jacket copy stress how the women in “Off Keck Road” stay put, as opposed to the wanderers in your first two books. I wonder if this was a conscious decision on your part--did you say to yourself, “Well, now I’m going to write about the people who didn’t leave Wisconsin”?

A: I did more or less consciously try to do that. I wanted to write about permanence. I’ve moved far too much in my own life; given my personal history I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to have lived in one place. I probably romanticize permanence the way someone who’d lived in one place might daydream of voyages. Permanence, like peace, like commitment, like writing, for that matter, is not essentially glamorous. But it can be sustaining, heroic on a human scale.

Q: As much if not more than staying put, this novella seems to be a fictional disquisition on the subject of love--on something you and I talk about, on how culturally love is supposed to be something--the great romance, I guess, and life-fulfilling--and yet the reality of love is markedly different.

A: I usually write--and in this I think I’m not the least bit unusual--a few years behind myself. My first three novels were largely about childhood and early youth. I’m finally beginning to try to write about love. As you know, it’s immensely hard because all our ideas about love are so worn, so encrusted with the gunk of thousands of pages, thousands of years of dramatic and narrative attempt. One has to hack through the sentimentality we all, in some way, want to protect. It’s difficult to find the authentic words and gestures. So much about love seems to me to come out of books and movies, not from life.

Q: Yes, I was at once thrilled and disconcerted when the character Shelley seduces her married neighbor George with the words, “Hey, you over there, I’ve got an itch.”

A: Shelley’s scenes with George I see alongside an earlier scene: Bea, young in her new car, going to see a new place outside of town. The hopefulness, the innocent brightness, the new shiny car alongside Shelley and George to me form the truth about my hometown, both that innocence and that absolutely unglamorous fugitive sensuality which you’ll find no record of in any of our national culture.

Q: Bea, the novella’s main character, says she wants a husband and family of the Green Bay variety, and yet she seems to lack the basic talent for engaging romantically with men. In matters of love, her acuity and realism are a hindrance.

A: Bea is definitely the skeptical kind of comic heroine who usually gets turned around when her Benedick arrives. But in life, unlike in books, there seem to be a great many comic heroines who don’t experience such a turn, and I wanted to write about one of them.

Q: “Off Keck Road” has some interesting things to say about the nature of home. Bea’s in real estate; she has a realistic sense of what people’s homes are worth, and is also the master of the selling touch--the right bit of staged interior decoration that will clinch a sale. The same attributes that cut her off from romance serve her well in her job.

A: The way we feel about our homes is a huge part of the American mythology. Real estate, realty--the words themselves and all their implications were used to enormous effect in Richard Ford’s “Independence Day.” But his Realtor was a man. So many of the Realtors I’ve met in my life are women. In fact, we bought our house from a woman Realtor. It’s an interesting career for women. Because it involves taking a traditional arena for women--the home--and making it a business. Our feelings about home and settlement are subject to the same trappings [as] our feelings about love and romance. Bea is not oblivious to these trappings. What is the American dream? Part of it is owning one’s own home.

Q: In reality, Bea’s deepest feelings seem to be for her mother and for her great friend June--and yet, she subtly aids in sending June away from Green Bay thanks to an unspoken competition over a man who chases both of them, Bill Alberts. Do you think this is a failure of Bea’s self-awareness?

A: It’s one of the double truths we all experience. Often, one of the mysteries of jealousy and envy is how close they live to home. We are much more often envious of our sisters or our intimates than of people who truly have much more than we do. Bea truly didn’t want June to get Bill and yet she didn’t want her to leave town either. She wanted to keep her in the relationship they had--both single, in a long punctuated conversation.

Q: One of your reviewers suggested there was sexual pity in the book, presumably for the women who don’t get married. Yet Bea’s life is full and successful and Shelley has taken charge of her own life in remarkable ways.

A: I don’t see sexual pity in the book, either. Seventy-one years ago, in “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf complained that women in fiction, the characters, were only presented in relation to men, not to each other or to work, or to parents or to any number of contexts women were in fact engaged in, every day. In popular culture, women are still presented thinking about men, dressing for men, judging themselves in relation to men. Perhaps some of this reflects a truth, but there are also other truths we all know of from our lives. I remember a distinct phase in my life, it lasted many years, when I had no idea, truly no idea how I would ever be able to get married or have a family. I wanted that, but I had no idea how to go about it. It seemed almost impossible to get from where I was to that far country of family life. At that time, I was a single woman, living in New York, dating unoccasionally.

Two places I went to puncture the dailiness of my life then were artists’ colonies, Yaddo and MacDowell. From these rural, beautiful retreats I met other artists from New York City, painters who lived in Brooklyn in lofts where they ate and slept and cooked chicken soup as well as painted; or they lived downtown in TriBeCa, these older women who had godchildren but no children, affairs, friendships but no regular boyfriends. At that time, I was afraid of becoming one of them.

Now, that life seems to be beautiful and valuable, as profound and as good as any other. Maybe more so. Jane Austen spent her whole life alone and single, writing in her family’s busy parlor about romantic love that ended in her books in marriage.

Right now, I am living in a roil of family life, in the midst of its exquisite joys and exuberant noise. As much as family life perhaps shimmered as a kind of distant unattainable beauty to Jane Austen, those solitary women’s lives of single pursuit shine for me, no less burnished in their luster for having once been mine.