Maria Semple made an instant, jarring discovery when she moved with her boyfriend and daughter from Los Angeles to Seattle, a city whose Patagonia-clad inhabitants like to talk about bicycling, the environment and the eternally dull question (in her opinion) of whether it might rain.
“It’s just not a funny place,” said Ms. Semple, a novelist and veteran comedy writer who worked on the television shows “Arrested Development” and “Mad About You.” “I was in a miserable mind frame, and I found that I was driving around and all I was thinking about were funny things about how awful Seattle was. I would do these riffs in my head and I would polish them in my head. It was poisonous and self-pitying.”
But from those silently brooding riffs came an idea for her next heroine: Bernadette Fox, a difficult, creatively frustrated misanthrope who, like Ms. Semple, had relocated to Seattle from Los Angeles and loathed her new city.
“Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” published this week by Little, Brown & Company, has emerged as one of the most absorbing novels of the summer. It tells the story of Bernadette, a former architect who won a MacArthur “genius” grant and then disappeared from public view; her tech-guru husband, Elgin Branch, who is nerd-famous for an especially rousing TED talk; and their precocious teenage daughter, Bee, who has convinced her parents to go on a family trip to Antarctica before she heads off to boarding school.
In Bernadette’s eyes Seattle is an earnest, unfashionable, bewildering place where five-way intersections clog traffic, Microsoft is Big Brother, invasive blackberry bushes are a mysterious citywide plague and Craftsman houses are annoyingly ubiquitous — “turn-of-the-century Craftsman, beautifully restored Craftsman, reinterpretation of Craftsman, needs-some-love Craftsman, modern take on Craftsman,” Bernadette rants. “It’s like a hypnotist put everyone from Seattle in a collective trance. You are getting sleepy, when you wake up you will want to live only in a Craftsman house, the year won’t matter to you, all that will matter is that the walls will be thick, the windows tiny, the rooms dark, the ceilings low, and it will be poorly situated on the lot.” (...)
Last week at the Elliott Bay Book Company, an independent shop in Seattle, a buyer, Rick Simonson, listened in as two browsing women were chatting about Ms. Semple’s book. One of them said she wanted to read it; another huffily pointed out a Bernadette zinger that has been repeated in reviews, mocking Seattle residents for having only two hairstyles: “short gray hair and long gray hair.”
“She was pretty miffed by that line,” Mr. Simonson said, adding that he compared the response to Ms. Semple’s book to the attention brought to Portland, Ore., by the satirical television series “Portlandia.” “I think the reaction will be communal and social that way, and I think it’s a book that people will talk about. In a way, Seattle hasn’t had anyone really do anything that makes it look at itself and laugh.”
by Julie Bosman, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Matthew Ryan Williams
