Where’d You Go, Bernadette, by Maria Semple
Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I went into Maria Semple’s “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” expecting a clever, slightly chaotic satire with a warm centre. That’s mostly what I got, but I also got a structure that kept tripping me up.
Bernadette is, by design, difficult: brilliant, prickly, and permanently on the verge of bolting. Semple captures the specific kind of marital whiplash where the person you love becomes unrecognisable, and you’re left staring across the table, wondering when it happened.
»There was a terrifying chasm between the woman I fell in love with and the ungovernable one sitting across from me.«
Bee, thankfully, is the emotional anchor. She’s smart, steady, and quietly funny, and I cared about her far more than I cared about the Seattle “eccentrics” circling her mother like gnats.
»One of the gnats at Galer Street claims I ran over her foot at pickup. I would laugh at the whole thing, but I’m too bored. See, that’s why I call the mothers there “gnats.” Because they’re annoying, but not so annoying that you actually want to spend valuable energy on them.«
My main issue is the file-folder format: emails, letters, school reports, and corporate memos. I don’t mind an epistolary novel when it creates intimacy, but here it often felt like quirkiness for its own sake. I kept wanting the book to stop submitting documents, and start being a novel.
When Semple stops fussing with the format, the writing is really good. The Antarctica sections are the standout: vivid, strange, and specific in a way that made me slow down just to admire the sentences.
»I saw hundreds of them, cathedrals of ice, rubbed like salt licks; shipwrecks, polished from wear like marble steps at the Vatican; Lincoln Centers capsized and pockmarked; airplane hangars carved by Louise Nevelson; thirty-story buildings, impossibly arched like out of a world’s fair; white, yes, but blue, too, every blue on the color wheel, deep like a navy blazer, incandescent like a neon sign, royal like a Frenchman’s shirt, powder like Peter Rabbit’s cloth coat, these icy monsters roaming the forbidding black.«
The corporate satire also didn’t land for me. Name-dropping Microsoft doesn’t make the critique sharper; it just makes it oddly specific, when the behaviour being mocked is basically universal in big corporations.
I did enjoy the humour which, at times, made me want to go to either of the poles as well…
»I had to go. If for no other reason than to be able to put my hand on the South Pole marker and declare that the world literally revolved around me.«
Overall, I liked the style more than the story, and I admired the wit more than I enjoyed the plotting. Still, it’s funny, it’s smart, and it’s just a bit too pleased with itself.
Three stars out of five.
