Simpson, Mona. Off Keck Road. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.
I didn’t realize this book is a novella. 167 pages long. A piece of cake to read on a quiet Sunday. The sad thing is I didn’t really get into it, despite it being a quick read. The story starts off being about Bea Maxwell but then veers away to take in other members on and off Keck Road. The character placement seems jumbled. New characters appear without clear introduction or connection to Bea. I felt I needed a chart to keep characters straight. However, character development was brilliant, intimate even. When we first meet Bea, she is a college girl, home on vacation in the 1950s. She has certain definable traits that stay with her throughout the rest of the novella, ending in the 1980s. It’s a portrait of a woman who never leaves her small town. Her life never really takes her beyond Green Bay, Wisconsin’s city limits without reeling her back in.
Favorite lines, “He was the kind of man who ceded his place in traffic. He never asserted himself in conflicts over lanes or parking spaces” (p 80).
BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter, “Big Ten Country: The Literary Midwest (Wisconsin).
Also in the chapter, “Two, or Three, Are Better Than One” (p 226). Note: in this chapter Pearl suggests reading Off Keck Road together with Our Kind: a Novel in Stories by Kate Walbert; two stories about the lives of women.
~*LunaSea*~ 