'Today Will Be Different' Quirky but Disappointing

Maria Semple’s third novel follows Eleanor Flood, a middle-aged, married mother who finds herself in the midst of a midlife crisis; one morning, she decides she will change her monotonous life and tells herself, as the title indicates, that “Today Will Be Different.” After her previous novels, “This One Is Mine” and “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” (the latter of which is a national bestseller), Semple has built herself an impressive following of readers who love her stories for their middle-aged, married mother characters and for Semple’s entertaining style and timely humor. However, the overall plot of this story lacks the coherence it needs to be an effective novel. “Today Will Be Different” is ultimately too erratic to successfully build depth, despite the quirky style, humor, and relatability of its main character.

One of Semple’s few successes is her ability to make Eleanor more personable to readers through witty humor. Countless timely jokes that make the reader smile and serve to make Eleanor more accessible with their normality are interspersed throughout “Today Will Be Different.” “... I half expected a disco song to erupt, but instead it was giggles. God bless the gay and the young. Or the gay and the gay,” says Eleanor about her gay former colleague and eight year-old son Timby who, based on the fact that he enjoys wearing makeup, Eleanor believes may be gay. Some jokes describe moments that may actually have occurred in the lives of many of the parents reading the novel: “Timby said[,] ‘Piper Veal called me a bad word…[The first letter was] C.’ [Eleanor] said, “A third grader called you the c-word?’ Timby replied, ‘Yeah. Cow.’” Semple further actualizes her character by incorporating visuals to accompany the story. Eleanor, for example, is trying to be a writer and graphic novelist, and Semple includes actual pages of her mini graphic novel, “The Flood Girls,” to substantiate and make Eleanor more tangible and real. While this is far from the first time that an author has included their characters’ art inside a novel, this artistic decision flows well enough that the reader can imagine a reality in which the drawings, and by extension Eleanor and her situation, seem real.

Semple’s downfall lies in her failure to create depth, thus making moments of attempted profundity come across as scattered. Semple throws in touching maxims that ring true but that in the end have no meaning given the context. “‘That’s the thing about hard times…. Generally speaking, one survives,” says Eleanor, about having to buy clothes in the “chunky section” as a child. “I’d turn fifty in May. My accomplishments? To most people they’d be the stuff of pipe dreams. Anything I’d set out to achieve in this lifetime, I’d done it with grace to spare. Except loving well the people I loved the most,” she realizes while Eleanor’s friend Alonzo plays a magic trick on Timby. Perhaps this is Semple’s way of saying that moments of realization and clarity come in the most random and unexpected times, but within the novel, the moments themselves seem so random and unexpected they lose whatever depth they were initially meant to create.

Another major flaw in the novel is the incongruence of the second and third acts. The revealing nature of second act, which goes over an important relationship of Eleanor’s, and the nonsensicality of the third act, which reveals why Eleanor’s husband, Joe, has been acting strange, essentially cancel each other out. In the third act, Eleanor finally accepts and understands that what she thought was buried in the depths of her mind is actually ruling her everyday life; she prides herself for getting to this point, but Semple confuses the realization with her characterization of Joe. By the end of the novel, his actions go directly against a trait central to his being and by extension, to their marriage. Why move Eleanor forward only to set Joe back, fundamentally crumbling another major relationship in Eleanor’s life? The lack of explanation for such a decision leaves a significant plot hole.

It is no easy feat to write a novel up to par with one as successful as “Where’d You Go, Bernadette.” Unfortunately, Semple’s “Today Will Be Different” is no exception to the rule. Though she tries to balance depth with her signature humor, Semple cannot salvage an overall message of moving forward in a period of stagnancy and immovability, as the idea is lost in the erraticism of this ultimately disappointing third novel.

—Staff writer Mila Gauvin Il can be reached at mila.gauvin@thecrimson.com.