Jane’s quest, the thread that runs through the book, begins in an amazing chapter called ““The Driving Child.’’ Until the night Jane sets off, she’s been living a hobolike existence with her mother, Mary. It’s Mary who decides Jane should go to live with her father, Tom Owens–Mary’s first lover, now a multimillionaire entrepreneur in biogenetics. But how will Jane get from the mountains of northern California to the small valley town where Owens lives? Mary teaches her to drive. They have a rattletrap truck with a broken back window, and Mary painstakingly instructs her daughter in all the details of handling it. Then she gives Jane a bag of cookies and fruit and all their money–$75. Jane drives into the night. ““For the rest of her life, moments from that night would rise into Jane’s memory to haunt and enchant her,’’ writes Simpson, ““so that finally she could only claim what her great-grandmother had once said after lifting a Ford off the junkyard ground to save her only child’s back: “I don’t know how I did it. I couldn’t do it now again if you paid me’. ''
After that drive, after Jane gets a chance to start her childhood, a change like a quiet snowfall comes over the book. While she’s in the truck, it’s as if the gods are in charge; now the action takes place on a human scale. At the center of it all is Owens, a character who haunts every page but whom Simpson seems to have deliberately left incomplete, unframed. Owens doesn’t fit well into the world he so easily dominates by virtue of his wealth: he won’t bother with the ordinary or the trivial, he seizes women as if by eminent domain and yet he’s uncomfortable with power and carries it sloppily. When his company goes public and he loses control, he loses his Midas touch as well. With Jane’s help he learns to trade in a more lasting currency.
Many more characters crowd the novel; whole lifetimes pass. Simpson has never written a novel so teeming, nor one so technically daring. Chronological time plays only a supporting role here: events take place as Simpson drops them into the narrative, letting past and future fall where they may.
Perspective, too, changes as she moves from character to character. Yet her tone is so calm and reflective that nothing feels rushed or jumbled. On the contrary, reading this novel is a bit like gazing into a motionless pool, waiting for tiny ripples to flicker across the surface. It’s a risky approach to storytelling, and it doesn’t always work–sometimes all that stillness drags on the narrative. But her language is as compelling as ever, and so is her wonderful way of prying into all the crevices of the human heart. What a pleasure it is to see a successful novelist take a huge chance and fly high with it.
