First, Bernadette fled from LA to Seattle; then she retreated from a dazzling architectural career and a MacArthur Genius Grant into domestic anxiety and disproportionate rages over the minor irritations of modern life; then she disappeared altogether, possibly to the South Pole, where she would at last be able to declare that "the world literally revolved" around her. In Maria Semple's deceptively jaunty debut novel, the question of how eccentric, driven Bernadette became lost to herself and her family, adoring husband Elgie and daughter Bee, is resolved through a dossier of letters, emails, phone transcripts, doctors' reports, instant messaging exchanges and more; the various documents are assembled by a cast of kooky characters in a series of ever more unlikely acts of reclamation, curated by Bee as she charts the search for her mother. There's even a live-blog transcript of an internet TED talk amid the documentary evidence: like Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, which pitches one chapter in the form of a PowerPoint presentation, this is a very modern comedy indeed.
The TED talk is given by Elgie, a robotics whizzkid who was "swallowed whole by Microsoft" when he and Bernadette moved to Seattle and is now a god among geeks on campus ("they hung a huge banner of his face from Building 33"). Much of the novel's comedy, and Bernadette's ire, is dedicated to a vigorous satire of Seattle as a company town and the locus of a certain type of privileged, overthought existence in which a gardener is a "blackberry abatement specialist" and the local self-help group is called Victims Against Victimhood.
Elgie, then, is content and fulfilled, while Bee, a frail but sweet-natured straight-A student about to go off to boarding school, has bloomed in the fierce beam of her mother's undivided attention and is happy to stand with her against the world. (When a disapproving mother comments that she could never send her beloved child away to school, Bee blithely replies: "I guess you love Kyle more than my Mom loves me.")
But Bernadette, after years of pouring her energy into her child while her talents dribble away into a black hole of boredom, frustration and self-loathing, is reaching crisis point: a proposed family trip to Antarctica a terrifying prospect for someone who hates even to leave the house and a series of farcical developments involving identity fraud, mudslides, workplace crushes and schoolgate feuds conspire to push her over the edge.
Bee ends up looking for her in the last place she wanted to go: on an Antarctic cruise. In the enclosed world of the cruise ship and on forays into the otherworldly landscape, Semple nicely evokes both the human capacity for wonder and its bathetic limits: elemental grandeur alongside heritage museums, awe-inspiring vistas as a backdrop to origami workshops and games of Risk. "When you're on a boat in Antarctica and there's no night, who are you?" wonders Bee. The white continent becomes a blank canvas against which to see herself and her mother afresh.
Semple (pictured) is a TV comedy writer, and the pleasures of Where'd You Go, Bernadette are the pleasures of the best American TV: plot, wit and heart. (There are places where Semple really wants to be writing dialogue, and stretches the epistolary conceit of the novel to suit.) It's rather refreshing to find a female misunderstood genius at the heart of a book, and a mother-daughter relationship characterised by unadulterated mutual affection. If Bernadette is a monster of ego, Semple suggests, so are most people, when they're being honest. In her spiky but essentially feelgood universe, failure and self-exposure open up a rich seam of comedy, but shame can always be vanquished by love.
