Where’d You Go, Bernadette? – A Heartfelt Portrait of Mother-Daughter Bond

 

“People like you must create. If you don’t create, Bernadette, you will become a menace to society.”

TV-comedy writer Maria Semple’s second novel Where’d You Go, Bernadette? (Published August 2012) is a screwball satire on the anxiety and minor aggravations of American suburban life. Keeping in line with the inquisitive title, the novel opens with the mystery of Bernadette Fox’s disappearance, wife of Microsoft honcho Elgin Branch and mother of precocious eighth-grader Balakrishna ‘Bee’ Branch. Years before Bee’s birth, Bernadette forsake her shining architectural career and a MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ to shift from L.A. to Seattle with her husband. At Seattle, after many miscarriages, Bernadette had Bee, a kid born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome that made the baby bluish at birth (hence the name ‘Balakrishna’). Over the years, Bernadette has become a recluse, holing up inside her crumbling family home, situated atop a small hill which was once a Catholic school for wayward girls. The damp walls and the blackberry vines poking through the floorboards becomes metaphor for Bernadette’s growing emotional despair. Husband Elgin Branch, who works round the clock on a new project at robotics department, overlooks both the state of his house and wife.

Although it’s been years since Bernadette moved to Seattle, she continues to hate everything about the city: from its support group, community-obsessed people to people's preference of hair-styles. The hatred is mutual as Bernadette’s neighbor and other moms at school interpret her eccentricity in the worst possible manner. Bernadette outsources even simple errands (like booking dinner at a neighborhood restaurant) to a virtual assistant in Delhi named 'Manjula', to whom she pays 75 cents an hour. She also confides all her mid-life frustrations to Manjula. Bernadette’s unraveling begins when the sweet but frail Bee proposes a family trip to Antarctica (a promised reward for her higher grades). The thought of leaving the house terrifies a borderline agoraphobic like Bernadette and therefore she sets in motion the actions, which leads to some farcical developments bringing in the FBI, a ambivalent psychologist, and even sets off mudslides.

The effervescent Cate Blanchett is playing the titular character in Richard Linklater's movie adaptation

Where’d You Go, Bernadette largely unfolds from Bee’s perspective, while the missing pieces in the narrative are inventively pieced through letters, e-mails, police reports, faxes, blog transcripts, and other documentary evidences. Semple chiefly explores the perils of a talented artist suppressing her creativity. At first, the exceedingly skittish Bernadette doesn’t come across as a likable protagonist character. But when we learn about her fabulous background and the subsequent devastating failures in her life, Semple makes the readers to comprehend the woman's temperament. Most of the suburban wives in the novel come off as caricatures, written with an intent to be disliked by us (especially Soo-Lin Lee-Segal) . But Semple’s sarcastic wit plus her heartwarming depiction of mother-daughter relationship kept me engaged throughout

Suspension of disbelief is essential to better enjoy the novel’s wild, farcical twists. Since Semple handles well the big tangle of emotions at the centre, the sweetness and sentimentality doesn't often seem to go overboard. The assortment of documented materials doesn’t exactly transcend the novel form, but adds layers to Semple’s exploration of themes like familial dysfunction, disillusionment, and privileged yet isolated existence. The author has got a good eye for satirizing the cultural and social dynamics of Seattle. She turns one of Bernadette’s extended rants on 'Seattle peculiarities' into something akin to a wonderful stand-up comedy act. While the personal frustration is always at the core of Semple’s wit, the real emotional pain behind such frustrations are also amply explored. In fact, the undercurrent of sadness keeps the narrative grounded and vivacious even as it veers toward absurdity. Semple elaborately uses animal symbolism, conjures a wild chase through the icy continent, and throws in sinistral operation of a Russian Mafia. In the end, irrespective of its inconsistencies and screwball elements, Where’d You Go, Bernadette is a simple, feel-good novel about a alienated, misunderstood woman overcoming her shame and failures through love.