Where'd You Go, Bernadette

Elgin Branch is an employee of Microsoft, as is Soo-Lin. The company and its mystique are depicted as a pervasive force in Seattle life. Bee Branch grows up thinking of the campus as a second home. Bernadette thinks of the company as “Big Brother” (26). The company provides its employees with free transportation and free vending machines, among many other perks, and asks unquestioning devotion in return (rumor has it that anyone seen with an iPhone will be fired on the spot). Bee feels obligated to add a rambling footnote to her narrative explaining that she is not revealing any company secrets or proprietary information when she mentions her father having a meeting in Washington, D.C. In the novel, Microsoft is the embodiment of the promises and perils of technology and of the kind of group or belief system that offers its members order and meaning in exchange for unquestioning loyalty.

Bernadette spends the first part of the novel trying to avoid a trip to Antarctica. In the second half of the novel, the other characters must search for Bernadette after she disappears while traveling to Antarctica alone. In both cases, Antarctica, a forbidding and seemingly blank continent at the bottom of the world, represents the unknown. To Bernadette, the continent initially embodies everything she has come to fear. It is separated from the rest of the world by the Drake Passage, containing the roughest waters in the world, and fear of the Drake Passage motivates Bernadette’s search for the most powerful seasickness drug available. Later it is believed she disappeared while her ship was making the return crossing through the passage. Bee experiences her sharpest conflict with her father and comes closest to believing that her mother is dead while crossing the passage’s turbulent waters. But once the characters have crossed it, they find that Antarctica is a land teeming with unexpected possibilities. In Bernadette’s case, it provides her with a new challenge and a renewed sense of purpose through her engagement with the building project at the South Pole.

The Runaway Bunny is a classic children’s picture book by Margaret Wise Brown. A young bunny says he will run away, but his mother tells him that however far he runs, she will always run after him. In Where’d You Go, Bernadette, The Runaway Bunny is used by Bernadette as a symbol of her devotion to Bee, though in the end, it is Bee who must run after Bernadette.

The Branches’ house in Seattle, Straight Gate, is overgrown with blackberry vines. Like Microsoft, invasive blackberry brambles are a real feature of life in Seattle which take on added meaning in the world of the novel. The brambles covering the Branches’ property are a visible manifestation of the disorder and neglect encroaching on their lives. The vines have taken over the basement and are growing up through the floors. Bee imagines them as a protective force, like the rose briars that grew up around Sleeping Beauty’s castle, but her friend Kennedy mistakes a living bramble under a rug for a ghost. After Bernadette disappears during the intervention, Elgin suffers a scratched cornea while trying to search the basement.

The vines also set a key event in the novel in motion. They keep invading Audrey Griffin’s property, which lies below Straight Gate, and she insists that Bernadette allow them to be removed by Audrey’s “blackberry abatement specialist” before the Prospective Parent Brunch. The removal of the vines destabilizes the hill, causing a mudslide on the day of the brunch and brining the feud between Bernadette and Audrey to a climax.

The homes that Bernadette creates for herself and Elgin form an important motif in the novel. Beeber Bifocal and the Twenty Mile House represent are memorable expressions of Bernadette’s gifts as an architect, especially her ability to reuse castoff materials in inventive and elegant ways. Made out materials others would see as junk, they are nevertheless clean-lined and functional. These two houses are almost like children to Bernadette, and 20 years later, she continues to mourn the loss of the Twenty Mile House. The conflict with Nigel Mills-Murray, the neighbor who ultimately buys and demolishes the Twenty Mile House, illustrates the combative and uncompromising side of Bernadette’s personality. By way of contrast, the ruinous condition of Straight Gate, which Bernadette had intended to renovate into a functional home, demonstrates how completely she has given up on her vocation after moving to Seattle.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette features several characters who expresses themselves using the specialized jargon of a particular group, profession, or belief system. This is an outward sign of their eagerness to identify themselves with a group or idea that gives their life meaning. Examples include Soo-Lin, who interprets her life using the specialized jargon of VAV (Victims Against Victimization), full of acronyms like TORCH and WYP, as well as Ollie-O, the former consultant guiding Galer Street School’s rebranding campaign, who fills his emails with terms like “drill-down,” “watershed get” and “black swan.” The “Jesus freaks” (165) who cover Kennedy’s birthday card at the Space Needle with religious exhortations and the employees of Microsoft who use the company’s specialized terminology provide other examples. Dr. Janelle Kurtz also employs the specialized vocabulary of her profession.

Bernadette and Bee share a love of the Beatles, and references to the group and their music evoke the bond between mother and daughter. The most important example of this is Bee’s description of how they sing along together in the car to “Abbey Road” the morning of the mudslide, before Bernadette’s encounter with a furious Audrey Griffin leaves her traumatized. In Antarctica, Bee shares one of her and mother’s inside jokes, using a quote about Ringo Starr to describe their dog, Ice Cream, and is surprised when her father doesn’t get the reference. When Bee wants to express her displeasure over Soo-Lin’s presence in her father’s life, she calls her “Yoko Ono.”