A New Novel by Maria Semple, Author of ‘Where’d You Go, Bernadette’

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/09/books/review/maria-semple-today-will-be-different.html

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TODAY WILL BE DIFFERENTBy Maria SempleIllustrated. 259 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $27.

Near the beginning of “Today Will Be Different,” Maria Semple’s funny, smart, emotionally reverberant new novel, her narrator, Eleanor Flood, taking private poetry lessons, has marked up Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour.” At the end of the poem, a mother skunk roots around in the garbage: “She jabs her wedge-head in a cup / of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail, / and will not scare.”

These lines seem appropriate here. Although it’s a novelist’s right, and often her strong suit, to forage, ingeniously using disparate elements to create a sense of life, Semple has a habit of foraging openly, broadly and effusively. Not many novelists would reproduce a whole well-known poem early on in their narrative, complete with a scribbled-in definition of the word “awl” and, floating at the top of the page, a cloud-shaped bubble that contains the reminder: “8:30 Thursday Lola, Oct. 8th.”

Semple’s previous novel, “Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” was famously and cleverly strewn with documents — emails, F.B.I. reports and so on — relevant to the mystery of its heroine’s sudden disappearance. So when the Lowell poem shows up in its entirety, it’s a reasonable guess that this new book is going to be another tour de force peppered with intrusions of all kinds. And though the presence of the poem reinforces Semple’s calisthenic understanding of what a novel can and should contain — even what a novel is, along the way prodding readers to mark up her ­underline- and ­exclamation-point-worthy book — with one other significant exception (a 16-page, full-­color graphic memoir created by Eleanor and, in real life, illustrated by the artist Eric Chase Anderson), this novel’s forager heart comes less from its “extras” than it does from the host of references and associations involved in that shape-shifting thing we like to call “sensibility.”

Eleanor is a middle-aged woman, wife to Joe, a hand surgeon who’s a team doctor for the Seattle Seahawks, and mother to young Timby, a student at the Galer Street School, a devastatingly easy satirical target that readers will remember from Semple’s last book. There are certain other immediately detected overlaps. Eleanor, like Bernadette, is an extremely ambivalent Seattle resident, wife and mother who had a big creative work life that’s now in the past. By returning to this territory, Semple continues to carve out her own Seattle and her own world. In Eleanor’s previous incarnation in New York, she was an animator on the hit TV show “Looper Wash.” Now, in the midst of her chaotic, ridiculous, bewildering, stuck life, she wants — needs — to find a way out of her specific, deeply dug rut:

“Today will be different,” the book begins. “Today I will be present. Today, anyone I’m speaking to, I will look them in the eye and listen deeply. . . . Today I will radiate calm. Kindness and self-control will abound. Today I will buy local. Today I will be my best self, the person I’m capable of being. Today will be different.”

Eleanor’s poetry lessons might help her be present and listen deeply, though the really memorable moment between Eleanor and her tutor, a mop-haired poet named Alonzo, takes place not during the analysis of a poem but in the middle of Costco:

“I arrived at the gantlet of food-sample people. They stuck to their script without deviation and avoided eye contact, America’s version of the Buckingham Palace guards. If the Buckingham Palace guards had terrible posture and filled you with existential dread.”

“ ‘Jack cheese,’ said a woman. ‘In four zesty flavors. Stock up for the holidays.’

“ ‘Breaded steakfish,’ a voice droned. ‘Fresh from Alaska and a perfect option for a healthy nutritious dinner. Try it tonight. Breaded steakfish. . . .’ ”

Alonzo, unbeknown to Eleanor, apparently has another job, as a food-sample person. (What? Poetry doesn’t provide good benefits?) “I was jolted by the mash-up of high and low,” Eleanor tells us, “the red plastic tray, damp and smelling of industrial dishwasher — his encyclopedic knowledge of the lives of the poets — the toaster oven door stained brown with grease.”

Yet that same mash-up of high and low isn’t jolting to the reader. In fact, it’s a Semple specialty. On the level of language, even the choice of the slightly disturbing-sounding “steakfish” creates a sense of uneasiness and absurdity.

Pop culture, which makes many welcome appearances, is a big part of Eleanor’s inner life: “Did I fail to mention that the pope was coming to town? Oh, yeah. For something called World Youth Day. (Does that not sound like a bogus event the Joker would dream up to ensnare Robin?)” Later, Eleanor says to Alonzo, “See you next week? Same Bat Time.” Both are references to the TV version of “Batman,” which was created by the author’s father, Lorenzo Semple Jr. In a nod to high(er) culture, Eleanor is a direct descendant of President John Tyler; apparently Semple is too.

The churn of eclectic material is given order partly through Semple’s decision to set the novel over the course of a single day, a gambit that works well, though naturally with a different effect from, say, “Mrs. Dalloway.” This format serves as a set of brackets into which a variety of things — poetry, steakfish, private-school parents, New Orleans society, the revelation of a husband’s secret life and meditations on marriage, death and being the child of an alcoholic — can comfortably fit. But what’s true about novels that take place over a single day is that, of course, they often really take place over a lifetime. The characters have memories, fantasies, desires, all of which serve as a toggle switch, allowing the narrative to move easily among past, present and future.

Although Semple takes a leisurely amount of time to go where she likes, once in a while a fragment of Eleanor’s history yanks the book sharply into urgency. At the Galer Street School, among the volunteering moms and lone dad (“Put these parents in a room with clerical work and zero supervision, and they start acting like the deranged winners in an Indian casino ad”), Eleanor ­notices a set of keys on the table, attached to a lanyard with baby blocks that read: D-E-L-P-H-I-N-E. In short order, she steals the keys.

The moment, arriving in a tide of amusing references and ferocious wit, is weirdly unsettling, bringing to mind a scene in the Hitchcock movie “Spellbound,” in which the tines of a fork, dragged along a tablecloth, create lines that serve as a memory trigger. Hitchcock’s ode to Freud had a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí; “Today Will Be Different” is entirely designed by Maria Semple, and at moments like this it’s not unlike a dream.

Semple’s heroine free-associates in many directions, and the narrative lingers in a plaintive, emotional story about Eleanor and her sister, Ivy — “The Flood Girls” of the 16-page color insert. Who, though, is Delphine? It’s a long time before we find out, but it all goes by quickly. One reason may have to do with what a former therapist of Eleanor’s referred to as “The Trick.” “Anytime I get into a one-on-one social situation,” Eleanor explains, “especially if there’s something at stake, my anxiety spikes. I talk fast. I jump topics unexpectedly. I say shocking things. Right before I push it too far, I double back and expose a vulnerability.”

Late in the novel, Eleanor realizes that for the first time “The Trick had failed.” That may be true for her. For everyone else, it’s a different story. The success of this poetic, seriously funny and brainy dream of a novel — “Mrs. Dalloway Takes Laughing Gas,” perhaps — has to do with Maria Semple’s range of riffs and preoccupations. All kinds of details, painful and perverse and deeply droll, cling to her heroine and are appraised and examined and skewered and simply wondered at. If that’s considered a trick, readers of Semple’s novel will be overjoyed to fall for it.