Welcome to the Slate Audio Book Club's discussion of Where'd You Go, Bernadette, the best-selling comic novel by Maria Semple.

I'm Dan Cois. I'm the editor at Slate Book Review. I'm here in Slate's DC Recording Studio. And joining me here is Emily Baselon, a Slate Senior Editor. Hi, Emily.

Hey, Dan. And joining us from New York, we have Megan Rourke, a Slate culture critic. Hi, Megan. Hi. So as always, with the audiobook club, please, if you have not read the book and you are a person who cares about being spoiled for all the funny things that happen in a book, don't listen to us until after you read the book, because we're going to talk about all those funny things. We're literally going to spoil every single thing that happened in this book. So there will be no surprises left if you don't read it first. Today, in our conversation, we're going to talk about a lot of stuff. But among other things, we'll talk about the dysfunctional family at the center of this book, about the unique form of the novel, which is sort of epistolary and sort of even beyond epistolary, about

Bernadette's view of Seattle, the Emerald City. And then I really want to talk about with you guys

how comic novels work in general and whether the bar for success is different or lower in a

comic novel than it is in another kind of book. But let's start with this family, the Branch Foxes.

Elgin, who's like a lead product manager at Microsoft.

Really, he's like a guru at Microsoft.

Bertadette, who is a one-time architect and MacArthur,

genius grant winner turned crazy mom and their genius daughter, B.

So they are the characters who we stick with through this novel.

There are other characters who flit in and out, but they're the ones we start with and end

with.

And I found that I had very complicated feelings about all three of them.

Was there one character, Megan, that you related to particularly in this book.

Was there one character in that family who you find yourself latching onto? No. No, zero. There was zero characters. So I think I am the person for whom

the charms of this book just do not speak. I know that people love this book. I read a lot of

reviews online. I found it at times enjoyable enough, but I actually thought one of the problems of the book for me was that the characters felt really like concoctions. And it is a comic novel, so they're supposed to be, to some degree, you know, this is not a work of kind of deep interiority. I'm not asking for that. But I actually thought that even functioning as they were supposed to function, these characters were full of contradictions that weren't the good kind of contradiction, but we're kind of just like, LG is one way. And then suddenly he's not. And then suddenly he is. Well, talk about LG in particular. Like, what was it about him that you felt like didn't track for you? I'm more interested in Bernadette and B, if I'm interested in any of them. And I have to out myself as a kind of lover of the genre of the novel narrated by the precocious child slash teenager. That is one of my favorite kind of books to read. Mine too. But I actually felt like there wasn't enough of B in here. When B was in here, that was probably my favorite part. And then Bernadette is a kind of character I'm really interested in because as a poet and artist, I'm drawn to kind of eccentric women figures. You know, so she's this kind of crazy mom who, you know, as you said, was a former architectural genius, you know, somewhat funnily calls all the other moms at the school gnats and does eccentric things. And LG, at the beginning of the book, I was just like, oh my God, this is the most accommodating husband I have ever come across in the face of the world, in known universe. You know, he just seems to be this like hard-hitting, like we're supposed to think he had the fourth most watched TED talk, right? So he's this kind of intense hard hitting guy, you know, albeit he works in Seattle and Microsoft. So that's a different kind of hard hitting than like the New York hard hitting. But he just seems to be totally fine with the fact that their house is apparently like a molding mildewy. No, no. More than that, Megan, it's literally falling down around them. It's a collapsing disaster. It's a collapsing disaster and never says anything. And that his wife sort of doesn't really seem to talk to him. And he just seems fine with all that until suddenly he's really not fine. And then suddenly he's fine again. And so that part of the book, which is the arc of the book, really made no sense to me, I have to say. What about you, Emily? I don't think I'm going to defend that part of it. I mean, I really had fun reading this book, partly because I read it on an airplane, which I think is essentially what it's designed for. It's like the perfect throwaway airport novel. I was so pleased because you announced we were going to read this book,

and I was literally on my way to the airport. And then there was on the shelf. Exactly. It was just

perfect. So I had fun reading it, but my defense of it is not going to address any of Megan's

acute criticisms because I think that essentially you have to enjoy it as

light, social, satire, and parody and admire the innovative form, like the use of emails

...