I didn’t hang them up to dry and hack them into strips! I just handed it out. wasn’t it?” Eleanor tries to persuade him to return to his post, but Alonzo dramatically tosses his apron into a dumpster. Why? “It was that look on your face,” he says. Embarrassed, Alonzo chases her down in the parking lot, vowing to quit the store. In one scene, Eleanor is congratulating herself for successfully concealing her judgment after discovering Alonzo, her self-important poetry teacher, handing out samples of breaded tilapia at Costco. While Semple manages to craft a multilayered saga, her comedy chops (she wrote for such hit TV comedies as “Mad About You’’ and “Arrested Development’’) are evident everywhere. In reference to a carton of Dreyer’s ice cream, the object that precipitated the sisters’ estrangement, Ivy says, “We finally got to the bottom of it.” Semple has Ivy use such open-ended language that, “We finally got to the bottom of it,” could be interpreted many ways. Like a poet, Semple uses words ripe with myriad meanings. As Eleanor puts it, “Because there’s me and then there’s the beast in me.” This off-kilter, witty send-up of life in Seattle (reminiscent of her last book, the much lauded “Where’d You Go, Bernadette’’) explores the gap between the people we aspire to be and the people we truly are, and the things that conspire to undermine us - principal among those being ourselves.
She then finds out that her celebrity doctor husband, Joe, has told his office their family has been on vacation for a week, igniting suspicions of adultery. But Eleanor’s self-improvement plans quickly go awry when her precocious son, Timby, fakes a stomachache and must be picked up from school. She begins the day with an oath: to look people in the eye, to smile, to be her best self. Maria Semple’s third novel, “Today Will Be Different,” has a straightforward enough premise: a day in the life of her narrator, Eleanor Flood, a well-intentioned, middle-age New Yorker living in Seattle with her husband and son as she toils away on a graphic memoir.
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