Saturday 17 February 2018

Where'd you go, Bernadette

SUCH A GOOD BOOK, written by Maria Semple and published in 2011 and happened upon by me in 2017. Being filmed by Richard Linklater right now and that right there is, as you know, an indication of something out of the ordinary.


As usual, the overwhelming feelings of love are incompatible with writing an organised and orderly appreciation of this SO GOOD BOOK, so I'm just going to do dot points.

- Piss funny. No, hilarious. God, so sneaky and mean and utterly hilarious in places. Maria Semple was a writer on Arrested Development before she started writing novels.

- I identified with Bernadette: that she began adulthood making extraordinary things and then she freaked out and withdrew, and then she made a bargain where she sold her soul and had a baby; her frustrations with everyone and everything except her child, the state she's in and how she got there, the elaborate techniques she's developed for accommodating her own self-imposed limitations. It was an uncomfortable position to be in because Bernadette is a bona fide genius as opposed to a person who is merely fairly clever, and what is more, she is a person who makes an indelible impression upon everybody she comes into contact with. The wish-fulfilment in my identification with her was quite obvious to me. But the novel is organised in such a way that you see her through the eyes of people who take it completely for granted that she's nothing other than the person they know now. It's really that situation that resonated with me, as it must with every person who has a child who loves and appreciates them without ever suspecting that Mum once had, and perhaps continues to have, an unfathomable self and a life of her own.

- the book strongly reminded me of Emma. The sensibility is the same. Shares with it the animating premise that comedy is the only possible mode for thinking about people, because they are just so awful, even the good ones. But to see the funny side of sad, petty, hopeless, appalling people is an unbeatable survival tactic. Ultimately, comedy is an ethical stance in that the distance and perspective that permits cool and dissecting scrutiny also makes room for generosity. A wonderful feature of this book is that the people in it who are most awful are first of all seen in their complete and terrible awfulness, you can wallow in how dreadful they are, and then, just when you've written them off completely, they're permitted to do something you respect and even love them for.

- Two-thirds of the book is epistolary, with a mixture of letters and other found documents, and then it becomes a first-person narrative. It works very similarly to how Pale Fire works, in that you're carried along by the story the materials unfold while gradually noticing that someone is building this assemblage, and they're doing it with a definite agenda. It's somebody naive and determined. You wonder who it is and what they're up to. You think you know who it is and you imagine them reading along with you, putting the pieces together like you are doing. The way this narrative setup transits into becoming part of the landscape of the story is phenomenally good. There is a wonderful revelation about which character has been assembling the dossier and why and then that person hands over the dossier to the character you had thought it was, who then reads it and springs into action. The backstory is wound up and wound up and wound up, and then it unspools in this unstoppable fashion and it's beautiful.

2 comments:

letssee said...

I've just ordered it, sounds very good. Love arrested development and completely identify with the losing oneself after motherhood...

lucy tartan said...

Good. it's great. I read it then immediately read it again