Lit Matters: In Defense of Persnicketiness

by Emily Vacchiano

My sister accuses me of being too finicky about what I read. As a writer herself, she is hardly undiscerning in her own choices, but she is often flabbergasted by my unwillingness to go past page three or four of a novel if I am not immediately taken by it.

“But you loved his first book!” she’ll exclaim, or “Are you kidding, she won the Pulitzer Prize for it!” She is so flummoxed in her reaction that I begin to feel like a stubborn child who has barely put the tip of her tongue to a vegetable before grimacing and declaring it not fit for consumption. Next time maybe I’ll try screeching, “I want something else!” while writhing off my kitchen chair into tantrum-ready position on the floor.

I am the same way with movies. If, in the first ten minutes or so, I am not captured by the cinematography or made to feel excited to see what happens next, I’d just as soon stop watching. Plays are a different story. I spent a good chunk of my 20’s acting in off- (and off-off-) Broadway plays and know that it is a brave and generous undertaking to risk yourself onstage for the entertainment of others. You can be the worst actor in the most awful play in the world and I’ll still watch you till the applause…even if there is no applause and I am the only one still in my seat when the lights come up (I suffered through some pretty bad theater, I’m not going to lie).

But, back to books. In order to prove to my sister that I am not completely arbitrary in my outright dismissal of several books she has personally recommended and my over-the-moon passion for others, I thought I would list the reasons I liked the most recent book I really liked: Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple. So here goes:

1. I liked Where’d You Go, Bernadette because I like stories in which someone disappears without a trace. I even like that phrase. She disappeared without a trace. If I know that’s going to happen in a book, I know there’s mystery, probably some drama and usually a certain sense of longing surrounding that person’s return. As a kid, I loved reading about Amelia Earhart. I was fascinated by the idea of her entire plane just disappearing into thin air. Now I realize her plane probably dove headfirst into the Atlantic due to mechanical failure or pilot error, making it slightly less mysterious. But a good disappearance without a trace will definitely draw me in and keep me invested.
2. I love when a location becomes almost a character unto itself. Semple manages this first with the colossal, dilapidated old schoolhouse Bernadette and her family call home and, later in the book, with the entire continent of Antarctica. The former girls’ school Bernadette purchases on a whim ends up coming to life and closing in around them as vines grow up through the floorboards and doors rot shut never to be opened again. Ultimately the house seems to swallow Bernadette whole as she disappears (without a trace!) from the bathroom one fateful morning. The house wages war against the neighbors and nearly causes Bernadette’s husband to lose an eye, but in the blindingly bright openness of Antarctica comes answers and calm and peace.
3. I like when an author succeeds in creating a character that has several dislikable traits but I am coerced into liking her anyway. Bernadette is prone to extreme narcissism, rage-filled rants and a frighteningly oblivious view of the world around her (she opens an e-mail to her Indian assistant, who she pays 75 cents an hour, with “You know what it’s like when you go to Ikea and you can’t believe how cheap everything is, and…before you know it you’ve dropped five hundred bucks, not because you needed any of this crap, but because it was so damn cheap?”). But I like Bernadette. I find myself taking her side in her struggles with her neighbors, her husband, her house, Seattle suburbia in general and the world at large.
4. I just can’t resist a true love story. And I like it even more when I don’t realize what I have been reading is a love story until I get to the end and it smacks me in the face. Amidst hilarious e-mails and letters between the eclectic characters of a Seattle suburb, what emerges is really a story about a wife who forgives her husband a transgression that most women could not and a child who travels literally to the ends of the earth to find her missing parent.
5. I like laughing out loud. This book made me do that. See #4 regarding the hilarious letters. I think my favorite was a letter to parents from a trauma counselor explaining “why your children were returned to you shoeless, jacketless, covered in mud, and full of fantastic stories” at the end of a kindergarten fundraiser.

To my sister, if she’s still reading this (maybe she’s more discerning than I thought!), here’s a general rule of thumb I learned from Where’d You Go, Bernadette: if someone manages to weave both the Russian mafia and penguins into a novel, I’m going to read it and I’m going to like it.

Emily Vacchiano is a writer and persnickety reader. Her dismayed sister is Lighthouse faculty member and fiction writer Jennifer Itell.

This post is part of our Lit Matters series, in which writers and readers express why supporting and elevating literary arts is meaningful to them. Lit Matters stories will be posted throughout the month of November, leading up to Colorado Gives Day on December 9. Mark your calendar for Colorado Gives Day or schedule your gift now. Thank you!