A Novel Asks Seattle to Laugh at Itself

Maria Semple in downtown Seattle - Matthew Ryan Williams for The New York Times

By JULIE BOSMAN, The New York Times, Published: August 15, 2012

SEATTLE — 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.

Matthew Ryan Williams for The New York Times

“It’s just not a funny place,” Ms. Semple, here looking at “gum wall” in the Pike Place Market, said of Seattle when she first moved to the city.

“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.”

Full review at The New York Times.