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.  

 

Father of Lies – A Disturbing and Explosive Critique on the Hypocrisy of Organized Religion

“Hell is crammed full of godly men.”

The unrelentingly dark Father of Lies (originally published in 1998) was Brian Evenson’s first novel. Raised as a devout Mormon, who was at one point even a member of the high priesthood of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Evenson’s bizarre collection of short stories Altmann’s Tongue (published in 1994) already caused some buzz among the church officials. The then 27-year-old Evenson was teaching at Brigham Young University’s English department (a Mormon-run university). A letter from an anonymous student, harshly criticizing Altmann’s Tongue, which also addressed fears about a teacher conjuring such ‘horrific’ mental imagery, caught him in the middle of a controversy. The administrators tried to quell Evenson’s desire for writing such horror fiction, but after receiving NEA Creative Writer's Fellowship he chose to leave the university. He began writing Father of Lies, a loud and sharp critique on organized religion that demands blind obedience over morality.

Father of Lies tells the story of Eldon Fochs, a Provost in the Corporation of the Blood of the Lamb, also known as “Bloodites.” He is happily married with four children and helps youngsters of the church to not stray from the ‘right’ path. Lately Fochs has had bad dreams and disturbing thoughts. The church elder recommends Fochs to visit a Bloodite psychiatrist named Alexander Feshtig. Fochs recounts his dreams, which involves pederasty and killing a young girl belonging to his church. At some point, Fochs stops visitng Feshtig. But the psychiatrist listening to his tapes and re-reading the notes believes that these aren’t just accounts of a dream. Moreover, two mothers of Bloodite church publicly accuse Fochs of raping their underage sons. Feshtig also discovers about the murder and sexual assault of a young girl in Fochs' neighborhood.

But the provost cunningly manipulates the church leadership so as to intimidate and even excommunicate the women who brought the charges against him. Meanwhile, Feshtig is ordered by the church authorities to hand over his notes and tapes on Fochs. Feshtig’s persecution clearly stands as a parallel to the incidents following controversy over Altmann’s Tongue. The novel chiefly unfolds from the spiritually bankrupt perspective of Provost Fochs. This is further complicated by the appearance of a demonic ‘Bloody-Headed’ man and an angelic ‘doctor’, who in Fochs’ mind are contending to control his soul. Despite such jaunts into surrealistic territory, Evenson’s taut, unflowery prose elicits great anger against the corrupted, secretive cesspool of a religious institution.

Brian Evenson doesn’t write the sort of horror literature that allows readers to go on a grimly fascinating journey, filled with ghosts or other deadly mysterious forces. The horrors in Evenson’s stories are palpably real, subterranean, and there’s no escape from his atmosphere of lingering fear. I read the book, confined to my room, in a single sitting. And immediately after finishing it I went for a long walk to try and gradually reduce the fury and pain drifting in my consciousness. Father of Lies, although not the most acute and subtle among Evenson’s writings, paints the portrait of personal and collective evil which echoes disturbing similarities to the contemporary religious authoritarianism.

The novel is a result of Evenson speaking to therapists and individuals who had suffered from abuse within the Church system. Hence the novel seethes with raw rage which mostly provides a two-dimensional, stereotypical portrait of certain characters. The author has made the same point about blind loyalty within religious sect to a subtler effect in his later works like ‘Open Curtain’ and ‘Last Days’. Nevertheless, Father of Lies is a disturbing and strange psychological horror on the utterly damned and corrupted religious organizations. 

The Hike – A Suburban Dad’s Psychedelic and Darkly Humorous Journey

“There comes a point in life when you’ve seen so much that hardly anything surprises you or bothers you, and that’s a shitty moment. Wisdom is so terribly overrated.”

Drew Margary’s genre-bending novel The Hike (published August 2016) is the kind of fun read I’d like to dabble with after going through weeks of heavy and deep literary fiction. This crazily entertaining novel opens with a man named Ben, a regular family guy (a wife and three kids), going on a hike to shake off the tedium of his hotel atmosphere, while taking up a business trip near the picturesque Pennsylvania countryside. What was supposed to be a leisure walk soon turns into a nightmare as Ben is caught in a loopy, unwinding path. Reluctantly taking up the advice to never veer off the well-marked ‘Path’, the bewildered Ben’s surreal journey brings him face-to-face with homicidal maniacs wearing dog-faces, talking crab, a giantess snacking on human flesh, and other odd nightmarish creatures. Styled like a fantasy role-play or video games, the path leads Ben to terrifying mini-adventures, while the eventual quest is to meet ‘The Producer’. Scattered throughout Ben’s fever dream of a mission are the brief trips down the memory lane, parceling out information about this middle-aged dad’s past.

The strength of The Hike is that it couldn’t pigeon-holed into a particular genre. Hence the utterly unpredictable and vividly imaginative craziness Drew conjures keeps us on our toes. It’s a part horror, I mean who couldn’t feel for a dad grappling with the prospect of never seeing his lovely family again.  It’s a dark campfire folktale, filled with compendium of eerie, magical creatures. It’s a love letter to fans of old video-games. Then there’s a snarky, sentient crab and a domineering yet endearing giantess named Fermona bestowing healthy dose of humor to the proceedings. Amidst all this The Hike also deals with thoughtful themes and meaningful life lessons, largely questioning humans’ control over shaping up his/her own destiny. Eventually, I liked the novel’s ‘what-the-heck?’ kind of twists.

Drew Margary, a popular columnist for Deadspin and correspondent for publications such as GQ (I went through some of his hilarious and engaging columns after reading the novel), in interviews has remarked that this bizarre tale has some autobiographical elements. Ben’s insights about marriage and parenting are pretty much taken from Drew’s life experience (like Ben he is married with three kids). The touch of loneliness Ben wants to escape during the business travel is also something drawn from Margary’s personal feelings. The author has cleverly and imaginatively amplified the nightmares he might have had during those lonely business trips (a mix of grotesque body horror and traditional fairy-tale creatures). Of course, it’s not an easy task. Despite unfolding the tale in series of weird vignettes, Margary deftly balances between delivering the emotional punch and sumptuously detailing the madcap adventures.

From Lewis Caroll, Tolkien, Dante to C.S. Lewis and Twilight Zone, the sources of inspiration are obvious (furthermore Margary cites Ruth Manning-Sanders’ short fictions/compilation of worlds with make-believe beasts as a chief influence). Yet the author’s energetic style of writing, punctuated with crunchy descriptions and undercurrents of emotional honesty gives off a distinct sheen. There are also some problems with the episodic nature of writing since at some point the surreality beings to dominate the emotionality. We know that, however harrowing and insane the situation is, Ben would somehow emerge unscathed and move on to the next one. Particularly towards the later-half (the episodes chronicling the face-off with Voris and the stretch accounting crab’s life), I began to wonder where it’s all gonna lead. It’s a rather niggling issue, which I felt was overturned by the intriguing ending. The metaphor of ‘Path’ is very obvious from the start, yet the timeless themes discussed here (family life, parental fears, ageing, etc) takes the novel beyond the genre trappings of fantasy/horror. Overall, The Hike takes us on a fascinating gonzo adventure that’s nerve-wracking as well as heart-felt.