Culture

Before Maria Semple was a novelist, she was a screenwriter for Arrested Development and Saturday Night Live. With the Arrested Development aspect in mind, there is no doubt that Semple can write great, satirical pieces. Her latest novel, Where’d You Go, Bernadette, is no different. In this novel, Semple draws from her own personal, and very much first world, problems of living in Seattle. Semple experienced the pain of not having a personal assistant and also felt that all 634,535 inhabitants of Seattle hated her. These anxieties are channelled through the novel’s missing person: Bernadette Branch (née Fox).

A friend inadvertently recommended this book to me. Well, it popped up on my Goodreads feed and I couldn’t help but pry into my friend’s literary life. I just like to know what other people are reading. I’m also just a very nosy person in general. However, after reading the blurb, I found myself wanting to know more about the novel. I was also quite taken with the front cover. There’s an air of captivating mystery about it that makes me genuinely want to know the answer to Bernadette’s whereabouts.

The illustration on the front cover consists of bold, solid colours. Despite its simplicity, the portrait of Bernadette immediately caught my eye. In some ways its simplicity is ironic because the story itself has a lot of twists and unexpected elements. For some reason though, eye rolling always ensues around books that are categorised as “chick lit” and Where’d You Go, Bernadette certainly gives off that chick lit vibe. However, this novel does not deserve eye rolling of any kind. As the winner of the 2013 ALA Alex Prize award and a nominee for the 2013 Women’s Prize for Fiction, Where’d You Go, Bernadette shouldn’t be pigeonholed by first impressions. I didn’t expect myself to enjoy this book as much as I did, but the fact that I finished it within two days proves otherwise.

From the very first page, the reader becomes well acquainted with the Branch family and the people who, unfortunately for Bernadette, surround them. The novel is made up of letters, e-mails, magazine articles, and police reports. Bee Branch, Bernadette’s daughter, briefly narrates in between these documents. Semple’s unique, epistolary style was a rollercoaster ride into inner workings of the Fox/Branch family and we enter at a time where their lives are beginning to fall apart. The unravelling of their hint of quirky, upper class lives is spurred when the family start preparing for their trip to Antarctica. This sets off a chain of events that take a major toll on Bernadette. She becomes completely dependent on Manjula Kapoor, her assistant from India (whom she has never met), and eventually detaches herself from the outside world. Bernadette and her absence fuel the events of the novel and the outcomes ultimately change everyone’s lives. From the Branch family to their neighbours to Bernadette’s psychologist, no one remains unscathed.

I definitely had my moments of eyebrow furrowing. Firstly, Bee is actually short for Balakrishna. Bernadette named her daughter after Krishna, the eighth incarnation of the god Vishnu because Bee was born with a heart condition that gave her skin a blue tinge. Maybe I’m being too sensitive but that just doesn’t sit quite right with me. Secondly, there were things Bernadette wrote to Manjula that made me cringe. A bindi is not just “a red dot,” thank you very much, Ms Semple!

Despite those moments though, Where’d You Go, Bernadette is an engaging, adventurous book and one I highly recommend.