...[an] off-kilter, witty send-up of life in Seattle ... it feels as though we are along for the ride with a slightly unhinged narrator at the helm. But despite its modest set-up, her journey feels revelatory because the language is steeped in metaphor, and the characters approach the feel of allegory ... Today Will Be Different is nothing short of a masterpiece, but best of all, it’s satisfying to read something that seems to have been so much fun to write.
...takes place in less than 24 hours, but packs in more twists, jokes and genuinely moving dialogue than anyone has the right to expect ... Semple crafts her twists and turns beautifully; they're always surprising and never less than hilarious ... Semple navigates the strait between funny and tragic with incredible grace ... Today Will Be Different is hilarious, moving and written perfectly, and it makes a good case for Semple as one of America's best living comic novelists.
...truly smart and deep and funny ... Semple brilliantly conveys a whole array of angst — self-deprecation and existential dread and a panic attack of neuroses — while simultaneously packing in a liberal dose of levity ... it’s a joy to watch Eleanor struggle to change for the better. That we get to laugh along with her is an added bonus.
...[a] zippy roller coaster of a novel...the ride ends, as so many do, in the same place it began, but with the view looking just a bit different. The reader disembarks with a happy sigh; ready to ride again ... Today Will Be Different starts off as a funny, rant-y novel and becomes, by its end, an unexpectedly heartfelt exploration of a woman’s inner life. (And yes, it’s still funny.)
...[a] funny, smart, emotionally reverberant novel ... [the] mash-up of high and low isn’t jolting to the reader. In fact, it’s a Semple specialty ... The success of this poetic, seriously funny and brainy dream of a novel has to do with Maria Semple’s range of riffs and preoccupations. All kinds of details, painful and perverse and deeply droll, cling to her heroine and are appraised and examined and skewered and simply wondered at.
Today Will Be Different, can be outrageously funny. But it cuts closer to the bone than Bernadette did, and its main character’s problems feel more real. This time Ms. Semple delivers less satire and more soul ... Speed bumps notwithstanding, Ms. Semple is an immensely appealing writer, and there’s something universal in her heroine’s efforts to get a handle on a life spinning out of control ... And Ms. Semple’s descriptions of Seattle continue to be priceless.
You don't need to be a disheveled, distracted human who hates board games to relate to Semple's protagonist from the start, maybe because contemporary culture has a way of making us all feel like failures just for being alive ... even as Semple distills the modern state of adult life with breathtaking precision, she also poses bigger questions ... She infuses each scene with jokes and insights, so that even seemingly trivial interactions with odious parents and an awkward lunch with a long-lost acquaintance veer into unexpectedly rich territory ... Semple has mastered the intersection of sad and nuts like no one else ... a reckless and scattershot work of genius.
Semple’s descriptions — no surprise to her fans — are loopy, deeply, darkly funny and brave ... Despite an upping of the activity from frenetic to madcap, the reveal to some may be underwhelming. The sentences that get us there are not. Semple is a master of the social skewer, boldly impolite and impolitic ... Eleanor is as sharp and Semple-esque as they come, which is to say a delightful danger to herself and others, sympathetic, and so very smart.
Today Will Be Different is perhaps more a series of interwoven scenes featuring a wild cast of caricatures than it is a tightly plotted narrative, but so was Where'd You Go, Bernadette? There’s much to laugh at, and be offended by, in Semple’s latest, which is why keeping things the same isn’t always a bad idea.
The joy, as before, is in the narrative voice. Semple foregrounds forty- and fiftysomething women who have all the zest, poor impulse control and boiling emotion of 20-year-olds, only with added menopause and fear of Alzheimer’s ... Semple reaffirms her gift for creating memorable, monstrous characters ... Semple is skilled in holding back revelations and planting clues to later emotional payoffs. Somehow she makes her seethingly intolerant and dissatisfied heroines lovable for all their flaws.
In Today Will Be Different, [Semple] dives into familiar territory with her usual sly wit, delivering another story of a woman trying — and mostly failing — put her life in order ... never takes itself too seriously, and while some of Eleanor’s issues are unique — see the wonderful, enigmatic graphic novel nestled within the book, illustrated by Eric Chase Anderson — we’ve all been in her shoes at some point ... Today Will Be Different is brisk, amusing and engaging, and Semple is a champion observer of the human condition.
...can sometimes be too scattered for its own good ... Unlike Bernadette’s character, whose snide asides and loony-tunes antics nearly always worked out in her favor in the long run, Eleanor comes off as more of a kvetch-prone worrywart with a scant grip on reality ... Still, there are elements to savor in Eleanor’s midlife crisis.
As in Ms. Semple’s 2012 best seller Where’d You Go, Bernadette, the shenanigans mask deeper fears of losing family members. But it’s hard to warm to this high-strung heroine who, like idle narcissists the world over, flatters herself that she is stressed beyond endurance. Really, there are no conflicts in the book that Eleanor couldn’t fix with three phone calls and her MasterCard.
Few books have made me laugh harder than her 2012 novel Where’d You Go, Bernadette, and Semple's humor shines just as brightly in Today Will Be Different ... The novel, like Eleanor, is a bit messy — there’s a 50-page chunk of pure back story in the middle of this single-day tale. The comedic dialogue runs too zany now and then — but it’s unrelentingly entertaining, with some nice pathos thrown in the mix.
Different [is] interesting in a prickly way. Just because Eleanor is almost obsessively introverted and ridiculously wealthy doesn’t mean she’s not worthy of our sympathy, but it does make that sympathy more difficult to muster ... It’s crueler than Bernadette, but possibly funnier. But it’s also, frankly, kind of a mess ... The central plot about a marital misunderstanding at times feels cheesy and comes to a problematic conclusion ... The book builds to a conclusion that will break unsuspecting readers in half with its raw humanity and aching need.
This waspish selfishness is a clever mask, but Semple has a knack of teasing out the warmth behind it. Spliced between the cripplingly self-aware narrative passages come pleasantly unpredictable flashbacks in the third person, as though she does not trust herself to report with objectivity ... Semple avoids patronising readers by providing a simple answer to Eleanor’s problems. The climax is surprisingly unthinkable, but as optimistic and tentatively hopeful as its title suggests.
...consistently funny ... The book's flaw is that it fails where it seems to want most to succeed. The intense suspicion of her husband's infidelity is really, Eleanor tells us, just a cover for the deep feelings of loss she has for Ivy. That loss is supposedly the true source of Eleanor's crisis, but it's the least convincing of her character motivations in the book ... The heart of this book, the parts Semple wraps the best language around, is Eleanor's fear of her chosen family's rejection ... Semple's humor is tight and self-aware. Her scene-setting abilities amaze.
Semple has a singular genius for turning the ordinary inside-out and looking at it slantwise. While the mystery of Joe’s disappearance supplies the book with the somewhat shaky architecture of plot, all the in-between business keeps us happily occupied with its peculiar mash-up of the madcap and the poignant.
Today Will Be Different slows a bit when Semple has to work in Eleanor’s memories of disastrous encounters with New Orleans’s high society at its most useless and lethally snobbish ... Today Will Be Different is a witty delight. And, as another, vastly different heroine once remarked, tomorrow is another day.
While both Bernadette? and Today Will Be Different are hilarious and heartwarming, in Semple's latest, the laughs come a little easier and a soft spot for the wacky one-woman show grows a little quicker. The reason is that Eleanor's problems are easier to swallow, and while the ridiculousness is laid on thick, there's heart and soul behind it.
...another wickedly sharp and funny book ... The DNA of Semple’s résumé, which includes Arrested Development and Mad About You, is threaded throughout her literary work. So too is the tight plotting needed to successfully launch and land a sitcom in the twenty-two minutes left to the writers once advertisers have had their say ... Semple packs the pages with laugh-out-loud scenes, dark story arcs, and tiny moments of tenderness. She’s generous both to her heroine and to her readers.
The power in Semple’s novel is its relatability...It is in small vignettes and vivid character descriptions where Semple’s comedy shines ... Semple’s novel is a life’s worth of events presented over the course of a single day. And in presenting that life, she also compellingly portrays the 'hamster wheel' existence all of us are faced with from time to time.
[Semple] has crafted another fast-paced story full of twists and turns that double down on 'mean is funny.' The result is a biting satire of well-off white liberal life that skewers everything in its path while maintaining a level of affection for its characters that balances out its acerbic sensibility ... one of Ms. Semple’s gifts as a writer is to treat everything with the same scathing eye ... Ms. Semple has done something intriguing with her book: She has plucked out pieces of her previous work and assembled them into something darker, funnier and more meaningful, making Today Will Be Different a much more heartfelt effort.
...if the stakes seem lower in Today Will Be Different, the humor, deft plotting and fresh and witty writing that trademark Semple’s fiction will win you over ... Semple’s third novel is leaner than her first two, but still weighted with cultural signposts and brand names. In fact, even for a plugged-in, curious reader, the signposts are overdone. At novel’s end, Eleanor’s soliloquy widens its view, and this time when she proclaims that 'Today will be different,' you believe her.
