After garnering critical praise with complex novels about eccentric moms and absent dads (Anywhere but Here, The Lost Father), Mona Simpson turns to the steadier lives of those who stay close to home in her fourth, and most conventional, book, Off Keck Road. Bea Maxwell is a pediatrician's daughter in Green Bay, Wis., coming of age in the mid-'50s and, after quitting a Chicago advertising job to care for her arthritic mother, marking the years to old age. Alternating brief, elegant snapshots of Bea's life with vignettes about another unmarried woman, working-class Shelley, the story brings the women together as social changes blur the lines between Bea's prosperous Green Bay and Shelley's rural Keck Road. Simpson has written a graceful novel about the compromises and surrenders hidden beneath the surfaces of quiet, uneventful lives. B+
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