Today Will Be Different     Maria Semple     (2016) 

She’s sassy, she’s manic, she’s self-absorbed. Eleanor Flood is a hot mess as Today Will Be Different opens. She’s resolving that she’ll do better, but the reader knows by about paragraph six that the day coming up will be different in ways that Eleanor does not expect.

I didn’t much like the personality of Eleanor, who’s a fifty-year-old animation artist living the dream in Seattle. Eleanor's supporting cast, however, is appealing. Her surgeon husband is a truly good guy, aptly named Joe. Their eight-year-old son is earnest and caring. The academic whom Eleanor hires to give her private poetry appreciation lessons has his own wacky and touching sub-plot. Even the dog is lovable in a we-put-up-with-his-foibles kind of way.

But Eleanor doesn’t get much sympathy from me. Maybe it’s because she’d prefer to live in Manhattan and is affecting Manhattan introspection and angst. 

The action does adhere pretty well to the Aristotelian unities that the author, Maria Semple, implicitly sets up by starting the novel with Eleanor’s resolutions for this one day in her life. We careen through the streets of Seattle, by car and on foot, as Eleanor abandons her self-improvement quest to instead solve a mystery about her husband. Semple weaves red herrings into this plot and fills in Eleanor’s family story with large sections of flashbacks, some set in New Orleans.  

The color drawings (done by Eric Chase Anderson) in the chapter called “The Flood Girls” are part of this slowly revealed backstory. These illustrations, presented as part of the fictional Eleanor’s art portfolio, fascinated me. I kept turning back to them as Eleanor referred in the text to the people depicted.  Because the character of Eleanor is an artist, this set of drawings didn’t come off as gimmicky.

I had some quibbles with the narrative voice in Today Will Be Different. Most of the book is in first person, with Eleanor narrating. Semple should stick with that so that the reader shares Eleanor’s lack of all the facts as she tries to solve the mystery. But toward the end of the book Semple veers off for scenes with Joe that Eleanor is not privy to. I consider this plot-cheating. I also found the ending of the book a let down, even though I enjoyed much of the ride to get there.

Today Will Be Different has some echoes of Semple’s 2012 novel, Where’d You Go, Bernadette. Both books satirize Seattle, specifically mocking the rich parents who send their children to elite private schools. Both take on the serious topic of how talented women married to talented men struggle to produce creative work when they also have to raise the children. Even if the husbands and the children are charming and supportive, it’s tough.