A Regular Guy : A Novel [Paperback]

Mona Simpson (Author)

Book Description

Series: Vintage Contemporaries | Publication Date: October 15, 1997

Mona Simpson's first two novels, Anywhere But Here and The Lost Father, won her literary renown and a wide following. Now, in her third novel, the narrator Ann Atassi has been replaced by a third-person narrator recounting the adventures of young Jane di Natali, but the theme remains the same: the search for, and the attempt to understand, the absent father.

This time the father is a millionaire biotechnology magnate named Tom Owens.  Into Owens's charmed life comes Jane, born out of wedlock, raised in communes, and now dispatched into  his care by a mother who is no longer capable of providing it; Tom is far from ready for this responsibility. Fans of Simpson's previous novels will not be disappointed by this excursion into the cracked world of family relations.

"Simpson is an attentive observer and a fluent stylist, but it is the element of subtle surprise that draws us through these pages, the magnetism of an original mind that holds us fast."
--Booklist

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Mona Simpson's first two novels, Anywhere but Here and The Lost Father, won her literary renown and a wide following. Now, in her third novel, the narrator Ann Atassi has been replaced by a third-person narrator recounting the adventures of young Jane di Natali, but the theme remains the same: the search for, and the attempt to understand, the absent father. This time the father is a millionaire biotechnology magnate named Tom Owens--loosely based, perhaps, on Steven Jobs, Mona Simpson's half-brother and the founder of Apple Computers. Fans of Simpson's previous novels will not be disappointed by this excursion into the cracked world of family relations. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

A daughter obsessed with an estranged father, the governing theme of Simpson's uneven last novel, The Lost Father, becomes in her latest a springboard for a luminous family saga about the overreaching ambitions of a boyish Silicon Valley tycoon and his vexed relationship with an illegitimate, adolescent daughter. Echoes of the Book of Genesis resonate throughout the novel, lending it an enchanting, allegorical air without overwhelming the uneasy, acutely observed family chemistry that is its focal point. Tom Owens, a brilliantly imagined hybrid of Bill Gates and Jay Gatsby, is a Harvard dropout whose Midas-like good luck has turned Genesis, the biotech firm he launched in his parents basement, into a Fortune 500 company. At 30, having long since written off his provincial high-school girlfriend, Mary, and their daughter, Jane, Owens has become an unabashed philanderer and an aspirant to political office. At the novel's outset, Mary, who gave birth to Jane in a rustic commune in Gray Star, Ore., and whose nomadic and flaky approach to mothering is a Simpson hallmark, teaches her 10-year-old daughter to drive and sends her over the Sierra mountains in a rusty truck to live with Owens in Alta. A fictitious North California university town, Alta is part of a paradisal landscape of rolling fruit orchards, flower and herb gardens and lush, suburban lawns. There, Moses-like, Jane is discovered asleep in the backyard of Owens's overgrown mansion by his friend Noah Kaskie, an academic scientist stricken at birth with a condition called Osteogenesis Imperfecta and confined to a wheelchair. Reluctant to accept the half-feral, precocious Jane as his own, Owens summons Mary to Alta and surreptitiously installs them in a bungalow. Jane has inherited from Owens "a quality of beseechment so imperative that everywhere she and her mother lived, a small circle of people formed around them, each one believing it was her or his responsibility to help this one child on her way." As Owens gradually grants Jane a larger role in his life, she pulls together a dysfunctional, ad-hoc family of her own, including Owens's longtime girlfriend, Olivia, as well as Noah and Mary. In Simpson's creation myth, the fruit of the tree of knowledge is money. As Noah's genetic research is contrasted with the business of trademarking and selling proteins at Genesis, Owens comes into sharp focus as a Northern Pacific entrepreneurial everyman, speaking a language of callow boosterism ("New York's over, Noah... The center of the country's here, now") and unable to relate to his family and friends except through gifts and transactions carried out by an accountant. A centerpiece of the novel is his 30th-birthday party, a lavish Gatsbyan affair to which Jane and Mary aren't invited. When Exodus,Owens's bold new initiative at Genesis, fails, he is abruptly ousted by the company's new president. In the novel's bittersweet coda, however, it's clear that Owens's exile from Genesis and Jane's simultaneous rejection of her hippyish mother's mountain heritage are what allow them to come together as father and daughter. Ultimately it is Simpson's delicate grasp of family planning and misplanning, of legitimate versus illegitimate parenting and the machinations of creativity and selling-out that make this rich and winding story so mesmerizing.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (October 15, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679772715
• ISBN-13: 978-0679772712
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.8 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #45,353 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

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A book about Steve Jobs, September 16, 2009

By 

Romain (Paris, France) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Regular Guy : A Novel (Paperback)

It is non-sense to write, as the reviewer put it, that Owens is a hybrid between Gates and Gatsby. He is a real guy, and his name is Steve Jobs. If you like reading about Steve as I do, I suggest you buy the book. In addition to the guy saying Simpson stole from Guy Gawasaki, let me reassure, you: basically 90% of the phrases coming out of Owens' mouth are from Steve Jobs. Most of them you can find in several interviews. Even Lisa, Steve's daughter, acknowledges it in one of her articles at the Harvard school of journalism.

20 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Why make new characters & stories if you already know some?, June 22, 2011

By 

K. Niemla (Louisiana) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Regular Guy : A Novel (Paperback)

15 years on, what probably makes this book memorable is that Mona Simpson derived much of it from the life and family of her brother Steve Jobs. This is /not/ a trivial matter for evaluating this book. It is, in fact, a huge deal and cannot be understated. Steve's daughter Lisa Jobs, who was a model for Jane in A Regular Guy, published an article in The Harvard Advocate in 1999 expressing her dissatisfaction with her aunt's "taking." Even without that, the parallels are brazenly obvious: Owens is charismatic and brassy, starts a huge company, gets kicked out, fathers an illegitimate child he denies, later and has huge feet (Steve Jobs does, did you know?). Even the deeper, unknown parts of his protected private life are in the book-- Jobs' mother died of cancer in the mid-80s, and Owens' mother also dies in a similar way, and the description of Owens' father is similar to accounts of what Jobs' father was like. When Jobs' first official biography, iSteve, is printed in 2012, we might find how just how much Simpson took, and I suspect it'll be more than anyone ever guessed.

Yes, it's OK to derive fiction from real life. But Steve Jobs is different. He /already was/ a character in published books, even if he's real. There are been many Apple books, and these books become much less interesting after Jobs leaves the scene; he is the most important character in the story, and almost a protagonist which drives the action. A few anti-Steve Jobs books told tall tales of his meanness. Even in the early 1990s when he wasn't as successful as he is now, he was a legend (this book was released in 1996).

His story is precious and peerless like gold and diamonds. Simpson could not resist plundering that treasure trove. This is not morally wrong and Simpson can do whatever she wants to her brother and I don't need to make an ad-hominem argument against Simpson (after all, if Steve really is a jerk maybe he deserved it? We don't know her and can't judge her). However, in terms of authorship it is lazy writing because instead of creating her own great characters and story she used as a template one of the greatest characters and stories of our age. The obviousness of what she has done in this book unfortunately casts a long shadow on all her other work: since we didn't know her family, "Anywhere But Here" seemed like a good book because we couldn't know what was original and what wasn't. But A Regular Guy reveals exactly how derivative her work can get, bringing all of that into question, which might be unfair, but it's there.

But Tom Owens is no Steve Jobs, which is a problem because he is the star of the book is and the other women and men orbit him. The author tells us he has charisma and intelligence, but the evidence of it is scant. He is a repugnant jerk. Steve Jobs can get away with that because he's Steve Jobs, but Owens can't. Owens is so difficult that it is hard to feel pity or understanding for anyone foolish enough to become involved with him, whether friend or family. It's true that some people can be good and bad, but it's ruthlessness-- in almost everything scene he is in Owens does or says something cold. Surely someone might notice someday that he is a waste of time, but it never really happens. Even his illegitimate daughter Jane, who didn't even choose to be born, is annoyingly in awe of him to the point that she can't express dissatisfaction overtly even when he fails to express real affection for her over and over. The things that Owens gets away are just plain aggravating because apart from being rich and successful (somehow, it's not really clear) there is no reason why all these other fairly reasonable characters in the story allow him to do and say these things again and again. He is an emotional black hole: other people give him love, and it is sucked away never to be returned. Since this black hole is at the center of the A Regular Guy universe, it makes for a depressing and tedious read.

The real protagonist of the story is Jane, hapless victim of poor parenting from her mother and father. The drama in the book is "drama" in the negative sense. It is truly a feminine book in that every little thing characters do and say has meaning to the point that it is tedious. Male readers will probably find this book difficult to read, and probably some females too. This is especially evident in how Jane learns and grows while watching the women around her. No real kid notices the things she does, not even if she's super-intelligent. Noah, a lovelorn wheelchair-bound professional, is a fairly likable character but it only makes you wish the story were about him and that he wouldn't subject himself to the torture of being around Owens (like everyone else in the story). Although this book came out in the mid-90s, it's safe now to say that Noah is rather "emo," and that gets old fast too.

The women around Tom Owens are generally weak even if they appear to be strong.Simpson does at several points mention the importance of appearance and beauty for women, which is great and probably the thing Simpson gets most right in the book. It captures the tragic misfortune of what it means to be born a woman, which remains with us today. For example, the mother of one character is said to have vowed as a teen to drown her future daughters if they were not pretty, out of mercy. It is harsh yet true that women are valued solely by their looks, and in 15 years not a thing has changed.

What has changed in 15 years is that Steve Jobs has become bigger and more famous than ever. I wouldn't want the same for Tom Owens. However, if Tom Owens is Steve Jobs, then that means that in the unseen future of A Regular Guy, Owens too gets cancer and battles it for years, suffering multiple surgeries and press intrusion in the process. For Steve Jobs, this is horrible and undeserved, but for Tom Owens it's the prefect ending and imagining it makes this book much easier to accept.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Hmmm..., July 23, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: A Regular Guy : A Novel (Paperback)

I found this novel surprisingly hard to finish or to keep my interest in as I turned the pages. After Anywhere But Here, and her short stories, I kept looking at the cover to make sure it really was a Simpson book. None of the main characters pulled me in, and I never really got a feel for what this novel was about. The narration seemed clunky and uninspired - and much of it read like a first draft, the important parts having not been figured out and clarified yet. This had no energy to it, compared to her other work.