The Lost Father

I loved this book. It created a whole world I fell into for about a week. I grew up with a father but nonetheless the young woman's yearning, as she looked for love in her life, resonated so much with me. I found it to be about much more than a quest to find a missing person. It seemed to me to vividly portray a young person, feeling her way into a deep and true life.

M. Simpson is one of the most intelligent, lyrical and emotionally-profound writers working today. This book is about an obsession that drives a young woman's life, an obsession as powerful and heartbreaking and life-destroying as alcoholism or gambling. Once she opens those yellow pages, she's sunk. While I may have wanted Mayan, at times, to do things differently, she simply could not, and her inability to derail her obsession introduces a suspenseful, dark curiosity: just how far she will go? Simpson tells Mayan's story with an acute eye for detail and such fresh, imagistic, musical prose that there are pleasures on every page. While reading this book, I lived and moved in a different consciousness--not always a safe place, sometimes a frustrating one, but invariably compelling, revelatory, and emotionally resonant.

I found myself completely absorbed in this woman's quest to find her missing father. I found her obsession at times maddening, always fascinating and deeply driven. I never doubted that true large things were at stake for this character and I found it fascinating to watch her unwind her life, giving more and more over to a search for someone she'd always been told was her father but whom she really had very little experience of knowing. The ending felt both huge and hollow, in some ways like the end of the Wizard of Oz, as if the journey itself and her own capacity for desire would be what she remembered and what changed this young woman, rather than the man searched for himself. The book asked large questions about the importance of a father in becoming a woman, for femininity and self-knowledge. I woke up out of this book as if out of a long dream, full of movement.

The writing is insightful and beautiful. Some of it reads like prose. The writer has developed since "Anywhere But Here" and this book is magnificent on a different level than the first. If you like books with great character development and insight, you will love this book.

Perhaps because I did not come to this as a sequel (having not read or seen--at the time--either the novel, Anywhere but Here, or the movie), I found this a most engaging book. In particular I admire the finely crafted prose, the ability of Simpson to find a language to express the grammar of human emotions. Recommend highly.