Off Keck Road

From Anywhere But Here (a first novel that prompted Anne Tyler to proclaim, "She is already a master") to her most recent, A Regular Guy ("What a pleasure," observed Newsweek, "to see a successful novelist take a huge chance and fly high with it"), Mona Simpson has proven herself one of her generation's defining voices. With three books she has created a memorable cast of searchers who leave home in order to reinvent themselves, to find the missing parent or dream. But in…