Bernadette Fox and Elgie Branch are a couple of geniuses in love. Along with their daughter, Bee, they live in an abandoned girls' reformatory school in Seattle. As they prep for a holiday to Antarctica, Bernadette's eccentricities prove harder to handle and, after a failed intervention, she disappears. Bee's investigation into where her mother's gone is told through emails, reports, articles letters and post-it note conversations, as she tracks the events surrounding the disappearance. Funny, biting and deeply moving, Where'd You Go, Bernadette? is ultimately one woman's journey back to herself after a long holiday from reality.
I fell pretty hard for this book. Offbeat and as eccentric as the characters in it, Maria Semple does an awesome job of capturing the intense bond between mother and daughter, and the blind, loving way one follows the other. Bernadette is such a fully realised character - so massively flawed, that it's hard not to fall in love with her. From her humble beginnings as an architect through to the menace to society that she becomes, her journey is poignant, darkly funny and ultimately rings true. Her relationship with insanity is as tumultuous as her relationship with the other characters. She's ultimately desperate for connections, but has no idea how to go about it - particularly when people frustrate her as much as they do.
It's a slow-starter which is the only thing that really bothered me in this one. It took me a while to get into it and even longer to see the point of the gnats (although the pay off on that one is worth while). Plus Elgie to me is not quite as realised as Bernadette and Bee. He mostly stumbles through the plot and while you understand his flaws, it's hard to pair him with Bernadette when he seems so distanced from her, even in the flashbacks.
All in all, it's a pretty remarkable novel about a woman on the edge, with real shades of Wes Anderson and the Arrested Development series that Maria Semple originally worked on.
4 out of 5 fallen ladders.
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