Mom disappears into thin air two days before Christmas without telling me? Of course it’s complicated. Just because it’s complicated, just because you think you can’t ever know everything about another person, it doesn’t mean you can’t try.
Not the opening paragraph, but close. Actually, this is the second paragraph of the book it essentially lays out the plot: Bernadette, mother of Bee, has vanished into the thin air of late December, apparently, it would seem, of her own accord. After all, although not a whole lot information can be gleaned from this or the paragraph preceding it, one thing stands out second only to the fact that a mother and wife has vamoosed. That would be a complete lack of terror which would normally crackle like electricity if the situation was such that Bernadette was not somehow the architect of her own Christmas mystery.
Email sent five minutes later From: Bernadette Fox To: Manjula Kapoor
Nobody can say I didn’t give it the college try. But I just can’t go through with it. I can’t go to Antarctica. How I’ll ever extract myself, I’m not sure. But I have faith in us, Manjula. Together we can do anything.
Interesting fact about the epistolary novel: when the novel was a form was just beginning to develop into something that everybody could agree upon was, in fact, a novel, the overwhelming majority of them were told in the form of epistles. This made complete sense as letter-writing among the population was then at or just about to reach its height of popularity. Non-fiction books were published that consisted of nothing but a compendium of a famous person’s correspondence because back then there would be enough to fill a book. Although already starting to become outdated before then, the arrival of the 20th century pretty much killed the novel told entirely through correspondence.
A funny thing happened at the start of the 21st century, however: communication very similar to letter-writing but not actually letter-writing made a comeback in the form of emails, text messages and social media posts. Before you knew it, the epistolary form was back and flourishing as it had not since the Harkers, Dr. Van Helsing and various assorted fearless vampire hunters were busy pounding out letters to each other on a relatively new addition to the average household. A newfangled thingie called the typewriter. Epistolary fiction will fade away again, but as Where’d You Go Bernadette? proves, it will probably never completely disappear as long as there are means of communication short personal communiques keep being invented.
I Googled Bernadette Fox. (Something I can’t believe I’ve waited until now to do, considering our unhealthy obsession with her!) Everyone knows Elgin Branch is team leader of Samantha 2 at Microsoft. But when I looked her up, nothing appeared. The only Bernadette Fox is some architect in California. I checked all combinations of her name—Bernadette Branch, Bernadette Fox-Branch. But our Bernadette, Bee’s mom, doesn’t exist as far as the Internet is concerned. Which, these days, is quite an accomplishment in itself.
The astute reader may have noticed that Bernadette’s daughter and husband have the last name Branch while she identifies herself as Bernadette Fox in her email quoted above. This disparity is further intensified here in this excerpt from a communication between Soo-Lin and Bernadette’s neighbor, Audrey. The mystery of Bernadette is concisely made in miniature here as it reveals Soo-Lin’s confusion. The confusion extends much closer to home than the admittedly profound enigma of how a non-Luddite can fail to exist across the breadth, width and depth of the all-knowing, all-seeing web. It is not until her mother’s disappearance that Bee learns that the mother she recognizes as a housebound agoraphobic was once a MacArthur Genius Grant-winning architect. Other secret and mysteries are revealed as part of the overall pattern of getting to the bottom of the book’s central secret mystery: where’d Bernadette go and why?
