Every so often, an artist drops off the map. While so many others clamor toward the spotlight, those already there decide one day to simply step out of it. And so Greta Garbo hides herself away, J. D. Salinger runs visitors and journalists off his woodland property, Grigori Perelman stuns the world with his mathematical insight and then disappears into the night. But there’s another version of going recluse, a version disappointingly suburban in nature: The creator who just stops creating, who fills her time with raising a family and the mundane matters of daily life. There’s no cabin in the woods, no “I want to be alone” proclamation. They remain in plain sight, they just ... stop.
In Where’d You Go, Bernadette, Maria Semple asks a very interesting question about such a recluse: What do they do with all of that creative energy? And with Bernadette Fox, the titular protagonist, the answer is that the energy she once put toward the design and creation of innovative houses is now spent on her own destruction. Not in a clichéd haze of pills and booze; she instead becomes sour, fearful. The MacArthur genius grant fellow now spends her time ranting for hours about Seattle traffic and the mothers at her daughter Bee's private school. Fox doesn’t much come out of her house anymore, and when she does, it’s to destroy her neighbor’s personal property in a petty feud. She posts Salinger-esque “No Trespassing” signs on the boundaries of her yard and jealously polices the property line. A colleague writes to her, “People like you must create. If you don’t create, Bernadette, you will become a menace to society.”
Bernadette Fox was, 20 years before we meet her, a promising, young architect. She was designing sustainably before anyone was green, we are told, and while she only ever created two buildings, she became widely influential. Her two creations were both houses. Her first solo project was an adaptive-reuse of a glasses factory, which she converted into her own private Los Angeles home. The second was a project called the Twenty Mile House. Starting with an empty lot, Fox declared to her collaborators and her contractors that no materials should be sourced from locations farther than 20 miles away. Materials were recycled, repurposed, rescued from dumpsters. The result: an eco-friendly house that feels “like walking into a big hug,” and a new way of building without waste, as even the catalogs left behind in the factory were glued together to create chairs.
And then, due to a combination of bad luck, pride, and Fox’s vindictive side, the house was destroyed before it could even be documented in photographs. The elusive house and the elusive architect became stuff of legend; Fox retreated to Seattle when her husband’s tech company was sold to Microsoft. She never built another house and allowed the fixer-upper they moved into to fall apart around her. Her husband, Elgin Branch, a genius of his own sort, plays an interesting contrast to Fox. His creations are constantly used up and spat out by Microsoft. The tech he created for veterans with catastrophic injuries becomes just another video game toy at the company, and yet he still gets up every day, goes to work, and tries again. His frustration at the separation between the two of them spills out at one point. “What you went through with the Twenty Mile House—I go through shit like that ten times a day at Microsoft,” Branch yells at her. “People get over things. It’s called bouncing back ... Do you realize how selfish and self-pitying that is?”
It’s easy to join Branch in wondering why Fox can’t just get over the disappointment of a project gone wrong and start again. Or, it would be, if Semple didn’t do such an insightful job in her book at showing how failure has a tendency to compound. When one setback follows another—a fall breaks a woman's leg, and another a week later snaps her crutch in half—a person of a certain temperament might take it as a sign that the gods didn't want her walking in the first place.
While Branch works in an abstract mode, turning ideas into technology for people he doesn’t know, Fox creates deeply personal works. Her residential projects—not houses, but homes—incorporate all of her quirks and habits. Her nervous tic of knitting becomes functional, as she knits abandoned glasses frames into screens to be used as room dividers. Fox has been mostly sidelined in the competition for significant commissions: She's considered too stubborn to take orders but too quirky to take the lead. When given the absolute freedom of creating her own house, then, she sees every component as an opportunity for innovation, from specifying unexpected materials to building her own furniture. The risk of creating deeply personal work is that it can be all the more difficult to distance oneself from its rejection or destruction. Semple compassionately ties this theme into a series of miscarriages. Fox feels the same mothering energy for her homes as she did for her failed pregnancies, and she responds to her destroyed house as some would to a lost child. She created something bodily, and now it is gone.
The point of the novel, then, is how to unstick stuck Bernadette Fox, and it uses all its madcap resources to solve the puzzle—which is where the book wanders off into the weeds. The satirical tone veers too far toward the vapid. The supporting characters, all there to push Fox toward her breakdown and breakthrough, are more viper than human. Semple switches the perspective of the novel from character to character, allowing each her own say, but most remain more cardboard cutout than person: There's the single-mother-yoga type who inserts self-help speak from her support group, Victims Against Victimhood, into every conversation; there's the gray-haired hippy-hypocrite who quickly turns harridan, threatening her landscaper, her son's teachers, and Fox herself with destruction for every small trespass. And by the end of the book, everyone has learned an important lesson about life—and I do mean everyone. Even Branch’s admin and the neighbor’s son come out better people for the process.
The redemptive arc plagues contemporary literature, and Semple doesn’t just put up a fight against it, she invites it into every corner of her novel. But what ultimately saves Bernadette Fox, the novel and the character, is their unexpected paths to salvation. (Semple deserves credit for keeping her novel out of the work–life balance morass. Every time you think she's driving in that direction, she safely navigates around it.) Simply put, Fox must acknowledge there is a world outside her door in order to venture back into it. Semple doesn't rely on clichés about the Ayn Rand–ian struggle for the genius to overcome her contemporaries' conformity, or a foolish public who doesn't recognize brilliance when they see it. Fox has already "found her voice." But both houses she built before her disappearance were intended for her own private use—what she needs instead is to use her voice to speak about something other than herself. It's the spark of a project that would employ her personal vision in an impersonal way that drags her out of her cloister.
Behind all of the distraction, all of the zaniness and attention-getting stylistic tricks, though, is a lovely story of a creative lull. Not to get all Good Will Hunting about it, but there is something to the idea that a person of great talent or genius owes it, if not to themselves, then to the world, to keep working and persevere over adversity. What else are you going to do with all that energy, run the bake sale at your child’s school? Not even Bernadette Fox would stoop so low.
