A Regular Guy - (Vintage Contemporaries) by Mona Simpson (Paperback)

About the Book

Tom Owens is a brilliant barefoot entrepreneur--a man who is wildly generous with strangers even as he resists any deeper claim on his affection. Into Owen's charmed life comes a ten-year-old girl whose claims he cannot ignore: his illegitimate daughter, Jane. As this raggedy, preternaturally observant girl seeks a place within Owen's circle of lovers and retainers. "A Regular Guy" depicts the miraculous chemistry that transforms longing into belonging and an arrogant boy-man into a father.

Book Synopsis

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 Now, in her third novel, the narrator Ann Atassi has been replaced by a third-person narrator recounting the adventures of young Jane di Natali, but the theme remains the same: the search for, and the attempt to understand, the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

About the Author

Mona Simpson is the author of Casebook, Anywhere But Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy, Off Keck Road, and My Hollywood. Off Keck Road won the Heartland Prize from the Chicago Tribune and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. She has received a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim grant, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, and, recently, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Simpson is on the faculty at UCLA and also teaches at Bard College.