08 Jul 2013 01:56:22
Bee's mother is Bernadette Fox, a renowned architect whose work ("She was built green before there was green") once earned her a MacArthur genius grant, but after the birth of her daughter she simply stops. Bernadette's husband, Elgie, has taken a job in Seattle with Microsoft and Bernadette's world has become smaller and smaller. She spends most of her days in an Airstream trailer at the foot of their garden and has even taken to using an online assistant to minimise contact with the outside world, particularly the "gnats", her term for the other mothers at her daughter's private school. Then the family go on a trip to Antarctica, which appears to give Bernadette the opportunity she needs to erase herself further, to vanish entirely into the white.
Semple's background is in television comedy and this is a very funny book in places; she gets in a few good digs at Seattle, self-help culture and the American private school system, but she also handles the metaphoric weight of Bernadette's disappearing act with real skill. Where the novel is at its most interesting is in its exploration of the overlap between the creative and the parental impulse. Bernadette, even when viewed through the eyes of her doting daughter, can be a difficult character to like, she has a lot of sharp edges, but Semple's refusal to blame Bernadette's predicament completely on the external is part of the pleasure of this book. The jokiness of tone and insistent kookiness can grate at times and the transition from the epistolary to a more conventional style of writing in the last third of the book is also something of a jolt, but as a portrait of motherhood as something emotionally draining and frustrating, utterly consuming and ultimately wonderful, it's refreshing in its honesty and complexity.
