Where'd You Go, Bernadette

Where'd You Go, Bernadette

By Maria Semple

Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom.

Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle--and people in general--has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic.

To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence--creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's role in an absurd world.

There are so many reviews and articles about this book, nothing I have to say will be original or fresh.  Luckily, I haven't read any of them, so I am completely unintimidated, and I will forge on bravely in spite of banality! Actually, what's really killing me is that I have simply too many other things I could be doing, which are a lot more fun than walking paths than have been trod over aplenty. I'm like, two books behind in my reviews again. 

When we come down to it, the book is good but it does not inspire me into fits of passionate defense or critique.  I liked it, I stayed up late to see where it would go (Bernadette), but now I've finished it I don't feel compelled by it (for better or for worse).

It does accomplish what it sets out to do: a razor sharp satire of a certain upper middle class, tech snobs and private schools, all wrapped up in a bizarrely appropriate midlife crisis that's apparently been dragging on for fifteen years, and a weird right turn towards Antarctica.  It balances a strange line of no one being likeable, but you kinda start to like them anyway.

My biggest nag with the book is that it ended too abruptly. I suppose it's a good problem to have, that your readers want more, but it basically ends with a letter Bernadette wrote weeks and weeks before the chronological end of the book (in which Bee and Bernadette's husband manage to track her down in Antarctica) and we're left with some kinda dangling emotional threads: sure, Bernadette will design a new station at the bottom of the world, but what about the baby with Soo-Lin that her husband is having because of all that time they thought she was dead? What about the emotional trauma left in her wake? Bernadette, I don't care how awful you felt that a house you built was bought and bulldozed by an angry neighbor - cocooning yourself and becoming increasingly bitter and introverted is how you get to the point that your husband believes you need to be incarcerated for your own good.

I can't tell if we're supposed to feel bad that Bernadette's been (somewhat) falsely accused, and certainly everyone should have the ability to live peacefully unimpeded by nosy neighbors and fellow mothers, but her crabby attitude extended towards her family as well.  I mean, she did outsource her life to the Russian mob, but even worse, she outsourced it to someone she was only paying 75 cents an hour.

The title works overtime - not only Where'd You Go geographically, but where did you go spiritually? Bernadette basically zonked out of her life, and while it's great that she was able to maintain strong connections with her daughter, in the immortal words of About a Boy, you need more than one: you need backup.  All that being said: I would definitely read a sequel.  Where'd You Go, Soo-Lin?

16: A Book With A Question In The Title

01: A Book Becoming a Movie in 2019 (Don't ask - but explanations are found in Black Future Month)