Like a breezy Saturday afternoon, Mona Simpson's new novella \Off Keck Road"" seems to go right on by without the reader noticing. It passes with nothing but the light rays of some decorative language bringing together a collection of friends and relatives to laugh the day away. There doesn't seem to be any end to the novel, nor should there be. Time goes by within its pages but doesn't really seem to pass.
The book follows Bea Maxwell through her years in Green Bay and calmly looks over her shoulder as she seamlessly passes from her younger years to her older days. There's not so much a plot as a movement of a single person through the events she is a part of. The novella draws together a story that is not wholly connected to all of its parts, but contains some ties to each.
Simpson guides Bea along a journey of several generations. The journey begins in a high school gymnasium with Bea and her friend Shelley standing in line, waiting to receive the oral polio vaccine. Shelley goes on to be one of the last people to catch the disease, while Bea quietly outlives her friend and takes note of the day Shelley contracted polio: ""It was a May Saturday in 1961.""
From there, Bea makes it through high school and college with calm and quiet footsteps that never end up on anyone's toes. Along the way, this humble girl puts her hands to use by picking up needles and sewing. While Bea's adolescent friends are ""comparing breasts, ankles and every small knob of bone on their legs, Bea seemed altogether indifferent."" In retrospect she notices that ""adolescence ... was a contagion Bea somehow had not caught.""
After her education is complete, Bea's life contracts back into Green Bay instead of pushing outward. She stays home and runs over the old neighborhoods that seem as familiar to her as to the reader.
Where Simpson's previous works, ""Anywhere But Here"" and ""A Regular Guy,"" which zeroed in on people trying to find themselves by searching outside of their homes, ""Off Keck Road"" analyzes the weight of staying home.
This theme plays itself out rather well, though sometimes the road Simpson takes Bea down is worn out with some familiar ruts. Those ruts have their own nostalgic charm, but throw up too much dust later in the book. The familiar Keck Road is given too much description, which detracts from its side-road status. Old friendships receive too much attention and take the vitality out of the on-going events. Sometimes Bea seems like an old aunt who just keeps on nagging you even though you would never complain about her otherwise.
The novella seems like an innocent girl when you first pick it up. It has no harsh language and handles every potential problem with a smile of phrasing and some gentle words: ""People ask me if I need physical contact, and I do. I need hugs."" It blushes when there's any breach of its dignity and speaks up only when the reader begs it to.
A rather loosely told story, ""Off Keck Road"" loses some of its momentum from time to time and can only start up again when somebody's mother or old friend passes away. This puts more age on the book than it means to and takes away the youthful grace that Bea possesses.
You can almost watch the white pages gain a yellow tint as you get about three-quarters of the way through. Because the plot is so lacking, Simpson moves to develop her location to a rich landscape.
With Green Bay as the backdrop, she takes a small Wisconsin city and moves around its borders to take in Keck Road and some events in De Pere. Though her frequent references to Highway 141 and the The Press Gazette get the facts of Green Bay right, she doesn't dare to capture its essence. Green Bay is filtered through Mona's words to pool into the quaint little backyard that Bea looks over. It is only used for its name and place without giving any details about the nature of Green Bay.
Simpson's grasp of the vernacular of northern Wisconsin is fair at best. Her dialogue of native characters seems foreign with disproportionate utterances of ""youse"" and ""wese."" These little nuances of the language take away from the depth of the local people who don't seem to appear often enough. Bea, though she's been in Green Bay all her life and is always surrounded by residents of the city, never does adopt their rustic ways of speaking. This seems empty and less than genuine. Bea is part of the world that surrounds her but would never seem to say it.
One of the overriding themes of ""Off Keck Road"" is the rumbling tension between the progress of commercialism and the ordinary ambitions of everyday people. As a real estate agent, Bea is constantly wavering between the goodwill of her neighborhood and a quick profit. Being the noble and honest woman she is, Bea stands by the people she is surrounded by.
Simpson places a high value on things that can't be sold. She states, ""Perhaps selling anything eventually spoils it for you."" She even expounds on the meaning of Bea's chastity, going on to state that a girl's virginity is ""[l]ike Christmas cake, worth nothing the day after.""
The book contains a bountiful collection of the wisdom of old women. On the nature of beauty Mona says, ""Being pretty had an end date, like milk,"" and ""[She] saw herself considered with a new consternation ' a tooth mismatched with a lower tooth.""
Then she turns her focus to aging, talking about a man who ""lost the majority of his hair long ago ... eliminating some of the usual suspense of middle age."" Simpson's smug take on families is, ""siblings were each guilty of the worst crime: they were each, unfairly, their mother's favorites.""
These little snippets have their charm but that charm seems to age uncomfortably throughout the book. Though the book may be like a breezy Saturday, the breeze picks up to become a cold wind and it's just a little too dry. All too quickly that Saturday afternoon drags on and the sun starts setting.
