Off Keck Road by Mona Simpson. Knopf: 167 pages. $19.00.

Our shared cultural metaphors are all about escape routes. We climb the ladder of success, run the rat race, stay on track, reach our goals. Slightly off the road, there are those who--out of necessity, obligation, or choice—remain out of the race, away from the revered ladder. Mona Simpson’s new novella, “Off Keck Road,” explores what is perhaps the more feminine version of the American experience: staying.

Simpson, a writer acclaimed for her subtle and wonderful prose style, writes about the life of Bea Maxwell. Bea, a restless college girl in 1956, seems born to leave Green Bay, Wisconsin. We see her driving her new red Oldsmobile Holiday, reveling in the temporary escape from the Christmas festivities at home. She meets up with her friend June and they spend an afternoon talking of life back at college. Anticipating the spring of their lives, the young women wait for the “startling redemption, that had not yet begun.” Gradually, though, as Bea’s life unfolds, we see she will remain in the small town, never to face a “startling redemption.”

The locals observe Bea and her circle of acquaintances, watching them age, and speculating about why they didn’t court men, cultivate nuclear families, and sport “the mom haircut.” They sidestep the fate of other women in the 50’s, not in dramatic ways, or even in ways they can fully control. Their tickets out of marriage and motherhood arrive by chance, and with a price—Shelley, the youngest of Bea’s acquaintances, is one of the last children to contract polio. It leaves her with a crooked mouth and a bum foot as well as a label: someone out of the race of beauty and love.

Simpson’s writing is assertively realist. She is sympathetic to Bea and her other characters, but uninvolved in the outcomes of their lives--the characters’ futures seem to present themselves of their own accord. Simpson neither saves, nor valorizes them: June, the single mother; Shelley, the polio survivor whose physical strength rivals that of men; Bill Alberts, the too-short, balding real estate broker and lover of jazz; or Bea’s mother, who puzzles over her daughter’s life. Even the houses on Keck Road become familiar characters, whose eventual displacement by Walmart Simpson records with detachment. Change is change, neither good nor bad.

Though Bea goes her whole life without romantic involvement, she still has loving friendships. She cares for her aging mother until her death, which forces her to change careers; leaving a job that would have led to a life in New York, she becomes instead a successful real estate agent. And though virtue is not rewarded in the fairytale sense, the reader may suspect Bea has a better life than her distant sister, a wife and mother. Simpson seems to challenge us to judge Bea and her life, which is only sad if we try on for size either Bea’s mother’s or the locals’ points of view.

This quietly revolutionary novella ends as it begins, with Bea in a red car (this time, Shelley’s Jeep Cherokee). This symbolic return to her earlier expectations of leaving feels almost surprising in a story in which the characters’ lives change but somehow remain almost the same. Readers might be tempted to think that Bea, with her styled hair “blowing right now into curls,” might have more options in middle age, but the scene is more “satisfying moment” than “startling redemption.”

    Wendy L. Smith teaches English at San Diego Mesa College.