"Today Will Be Different" book review

Sometimes style is better than substance.

This is the second Maria Semple book I’ve read—her previous novel, Where’d You Go, Bernadette, was a delight to devour—and I’m becoming a bigger fan along the way.  Her newest book, Today Will Be Different, is one of the funniest slapstick novels I’ve read in ages—and the genius of Semple is that she takes an overly simplistic story and layers it with so many hysterical backstories and tangents that you forget how mundane the plot is.

Many reviewers are criticizing Today Will Be Different for being too similar to Where’d You Go, Bernadette without being directly connected by characters, but I think those critics are being unfair.  True, both Bernadette and Different focus on well-off people who can afford to hire people for assistance (in Bernadette, the titular character has a virtual personal assistant to take care of mundane tasks; in Different, Eleanor could afford to hire a person to give her weekly lessons on how to read and write poetry), and with both stories the main characters are going through mental health issues (Bernadette is suffering from agoraphobia; Eleanor is dealing with anxiety). 

Other than those similarities, I think the new book seems familiar because of Semple’s distinct writing style:  she relishes in tangents; she will spend pages on unnecessary character backstories (the material about the main character’s family being direct descendants of President John Tyler was riotous because in the middle of a scene Semple stops to give a lecture about how ineffective Tyler was as a president); and she knows how to stretch a sentence into epic length (an introduction of Eleanor’s sister, Ivy, is a single sentence that stretches nearly a page long). 

This intentional breakaway from traditional narratives will garner Semple an equal amount of fans and detractors.  I am definitely a fan, and I urge those who are uneasy about Semple’s zany prose to go into Today Will Be Different with an open mind.  True, there may be nothing inherently interesting about Eleanor Flood to warrant a full-length novel—but it’s less about the journey and more about the author’s ability to construct a sentence.  In some cases, that’s enough.

Rating:  B