Synopsis
In her highly acclaimed first novel, Anywhere But Here, Simpson created one of the most astute yet vulnerable heroines in contemporary fiction. Now Mayan Atassi--once Mayan Stevenson--returns in an immensely powerful novel about love and lovelessness, fathers and fatherlessness, and the loyalties that shape us even when they threaten to destroy us.
Now a woman of twenty-eight and finally on her own in medical school, Mayan becomes obsessed with the father she never knew, leading her to hire detectives to dredge up the past, thus eroding her savings, ruining her career, and flirting with madness in a search spanning two continents.
"Ratifies the achievement of Anywhere But Here, attesting to its author's...dazzling literary gift and uncommon emotional wisdom."
--New York Times
"A breathtaking piece of fiction; Simpson is a writer who can break our heart and mend it in the same sentence."
--Cleveland Plain Dealer
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Reviews
Again displaying the assurance revealed in her remarkable first novel, Anywhere But Here , Simpson continues to chronicle the life of her protagonist Ann Stevenson, now in her late 20s, who has reassumed her birth name, Mayan Atassi. Having pried herself away from her manipulative, destructive, irresponsible mother, who has remained in California, Mayan is in New York, flunking out of medical school because she has become obsessed with finding her father, an Egyptian professor/gambler/wastrel who deserted his family when Mayan was 12. Where the earlier book was the story of her mother's deranged search for happiness, this one focuses on Mayan's phobic need to fill the void in her life that opened when "my father's leaving . . . fell like a stone in the center of my childhood." A series of frustrating dead ends, the search takes Mayan back to Wisconsin, her childhood home; to Egypt, where she finds remnants of her father's family; and eventually to California, where she discovers that "maybe by the time you find somebody, they are beside the point." Mayan's odyssey is also her belated coming-of-age, for she gradually matures in areas of social and emotional development that were starved and stunted in her eccentric upbringing. Her introspection about these inner changes, combined with the relative lack of action in the plot, sometimes results in a static narrative, one that lacks the hypnotic pull that her mother's bizarre behavior gave Anywhere But Here. This novel has its own power and meaning, however. Conveying character and atmosphere in intense, often breathtakingly trenchant observations, Simpson constructs a poignant story with resonating implications. For as Mayan realizes, some questions can never be answered, and life has to be lived all the same. 40,000 first printing.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Overly long, repetitive, often irritating sequel to Simpson's bestselling first novel (Anywhere But Here, 1987), which recounted Anne Stevenson's upbringing by a pathological mother. Now Anne, reclaiming her original name of Mayan, reveals the more painful childhood trauma: her father's absence. ``Disappearing was all you had to do to become someone's god,'' she explains. Throughout childhood, Mayan trusted that her barely remembered Egyptian father would reappear and magically change her life. As a 28-year-old sometimes anorexic medical student in N.Y.C., she finally tracks him down at book's end in spite of private detectives (who, like the rest of the men in her life, cheat and never return her frantic calls) and impulsive, inconclusive, sometimes deranged journeys through the US and Egypt. Mayan eventually learns to obsess about Tiffany pearls instead of love and becomes ``more like anybody else.'' It's hard to build a novel around a man no one knows, so Simpson offers a multitude of characters and flashbacks as context for Mayan's personal development: memories of her Wisconsin grandmother are sometimes touching--especially a set piece about midwestern widows in Europe; but most of the subplots (Mayan's interest in architecture, nice guys she can't relate to, a lot of whining about her poverty, intense friendships with megaconsumer Emily and Vietnamese orphan Mai linn, a sexually abused lesbian saxophonist) seem calculated and unconvincing. Mayan's obsession and emotional pitch almost always ring true, but cannot sustain this bulky, much-anticipated novel. Disappointing. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
This novel takes place five years after the events in Anywhere But Here ( LJ 3/15/89) and includes many of the same characters. Mayan, the daughter in the earlier novel, is now a medical student in her late twenties living a studious, if unexciting, life in New York City. Her existence is turned on end, however, as she becomes consumed with the search for her father, who abandoned the family when Mayan was a young child. The search becomes an obsession that brings her to the edge of destruction: She spends all her savings on the services of a sleazy detective who never gets her any closer to her goal and lets her studies, her friendships, and even her health lapse without seeming to realize it. A fascinating study of a person ruled by obsession, bringing to mind Vladimir Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, this novel offers a wrenching and provocative portrait of a truly dysfunctional family. Simpson's writing is straightforward and often beautifully poetic. Highly recommended. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/91.
- Jessica Grim, Oberlin Coll. Lib., Ohio
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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