Strong Start, Weak Finish: Where'd You Go, Bernadette

If not for the humor in the exposition of her epistolary novel, I'd have never read, much less bought Maria Semple's bestseller, Where'd You Go, Bernadette (2012). A satire of the Seattle-based super rich and privileged, I found myself not liking many of the characters because they typified so many of my stereotypes of the super rich: delusional, entitled, competitive, paranoid, and money/power/status obsessed.

Bernadette, a twenty-year transplant to Seattle and supposed genius architect, suffered a mental breakdown that has crippled her for the past twenty years. Seemingly disenchanted with people and life, Bernadette is reclusive. This, of course, creates conflict with the parents of her daughter's (Bree) Montessori school who find Bernadette to be off-putting due to her lack of active involvement and participation in the school community and the other parents. Audrey Griffin, Bernadette's next-door neighbor and nemesis, is the catalyst of much of the conflict of the novel, which ends up being a story of a series of high jinxes that result in Bernadette going missing. The novel's epistolary structure is the result of Bernadette's daughter's compiled email messages, official documents, and secret correspondences which she obtains to solve her mother's disappearance at the time they were scheduled for a trip to Antarctica. 

What started off as an engrossing, fast-paced, hilarious read quickly devolved into a slow, boring chore. Much of that had to do with the novel's decent into caricature rather than satire in the representation of the characters and the ludicrous development of the plot. By the time I got to the last section of the novel (one of seven) and Semple got rid of the epistolary format to relate the story from Bree's point of view, I had lost interest. 

Where'd You Go, Bernadette is an uneven, though stylistically creative novel. It reinforced my negative stereotypes of the super privileged, though the characters were not as vile as those represented in Amy Sohn's Prospect Park West (2009). Nonetheless, despite a strong start, Where'd You Go, Bernadette finished at a weak pace. By the end, I did not care about finding out where Bernadette--herself, an unsympathetic character--went.