The Lost Father [Hardcover]

Mona Simpson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 21, 1992

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.

From Library Journal

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.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 505 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (January 21, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394589165
• ISBN-13: 978-0394589169
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,372,646 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Mona Simpson was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, then moved to Los Angeles as a young teenager. Her father was a recent immigrant from Syria and her mother was the daughter of a mink farmer and the first person in her family to attend college. Simpson went to Berkeley, where she studied poetry. She worked as a journalist before moving to New York to attend Columbia's MFA program. During graduate school, she published her first short stories in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review and Mademoiselle. She stayed in New York and worked as an editor at The Paris Review for five years while finishing her first novel. Anywhere But Here. After that, she wrote The Lost Father, A Regular Guy and Off Keck Road.

Her work has been awarded several prizes: a Whiting Prize, a Guggenheim, a grant from the NEA, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Lila Wallace Readers Digest Prize, a Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, a Pen Faulkner finalist, and most recently a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

She worked ten years on My Hollywood. "It's the book that took me too long because it meant too much to me," she says.

Mona lives in Santa Monica with her two children and Bartelby the dog.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Inconsistent and distracting., July 5, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Lost Father (Paperback)

If you are approaching this as a sequel to "Anywhere but Here," you will be sorely disappointed with "The Lost Father." Important details, the things that stick with the protagonist (her Wisconsin hometown, her stepfather's last name, and her father's name, to name a few), are changed, and it seems this can only be the result of carelessness on the behalf of Simpson and *especially* her editor. If you are wondering what happened to the bratty and real Ann August, you will be disoriented once placed into the world of the overachieving Mayan Stevenson, a woman whose childhood amazingly parallels that of Ann's but doesn't quite match.

However, if you truly enjoyed the academic side of Simpson's writing, the structure and voice and insight and whatnot, you will find she still deserves the three stars I've given this book.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Like one character with two different childhoods..., June 11, 2008

By 

Joanna Mechlinski (CT, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Lost Father (Paperback)

Despite a back-cover claim that the protagonist of this novel is the same as in Simpson's first book "Anywhere but Here," I had trouble believing that.

For starters, the young medical student generally goes by Mayan. It takes quite some pages to reveal that some people also call her Ann -- the only name she was ever called int he first book.

Then, there is Mayan/Ann's childhood. In "ABH," she seemed to spend most of her time with her cousin Ben. In this book, Ben warrants a few passing mentions, but for the most part, Ann spends all her time with Emily and Mai linn -- characters never before mentioned. It's like Simpson has written one character with two different childhoods.

Still, a number of things remain consistent, such as Ann's dysfunctional mother Adele and her quietly strong grandmother Lillian. It's not enough, though; as Simpson's writing is strong, she might simply have decided to create an entirely different character rather than striving for a sequel that didn't quite gel.

As for the main plotline itself -- Mayan's search for the father who abandoned her as a child -- it's too drawn out. For reasons not clearly understood, Mayan has spent most of her life anticipating her father's reappearance; as a woman in her mid-twenties, however, she is nearly obsessed with a search for a man who is a virtual stranger. It takes a long time (and many, many pages) for Mayan to finally locate the man -- and when she does, Simpson does not really provide any reasons for the character's actions.

While this is hardly the worst book ever, I wouldn't really recommend it. Your time can be better spend elsewhere.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars It held my attention in a depressing way., November 18, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Lost Father (Paperback)

This author is amazing at verbalizing the feelings of a particularly under-evaluated age group. I found myself drawn to the highly-depressed character of 28-year-old Mayan, who knows she has "issues" but cannot get past them. The reader is caught in Mayan's whirlpool of unresolved feelings for both parents while she gives up her very self to do what scares her the most - finding her father. Her obsession with her past is heart-rending but familiar.