GO GENTLE, by Maria Semple
Maria Semple is a chaos agent. If you’ve been a devoted reader of her novels since her singular 2012 comedy “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” — which is when most of us hit the subscribe button — you will remember the titular prickly architect accidentally triggering a mudslide that crashed through a neighbor’s windows during a brunch for kindergartners and their snooty parents. Semple loves the human race — not in spite of our egos, anxieties and delusions, but because of them — and yet, she knows that calamity is always close at hand.
She amps up the mayhem in “Go Gentle,” her fourth novel and her first in 10 years. Like all her work, it’s a social satire full of dopamine-releasing one-liners and sparkling writing. But it can be frustratingly uneven. Partly because the plot — about a TV writer turned philosophy tutor who gets drawn into a global art heist — rockets so giddily over the top that it could send back photos of Earth. And partly because our heroine’s back story contains a trauma so realistically and grippingly rendered that it threatens to overshadow the screwball high jinks that come before and after.
When we meet her, Adora Hazzard has published a best-selling philosophy primer, divorced a grumpy, Trumpy husband, and is enjoying a buoyant middle age. The Stoics’ prescription for tranquillity has been a life raft (Epictetus is Adora’s main man, followed by Seneca and Marcus Aurelius), as has her teenage daughter, Viv, who lives with her in Manhattan’s fabled Ansonia building on the Upper West Side. “Gorgeous, shallow creature, Viv!” Semple tells us in one of her many exquisite character introductions. “Reliably irritable, bereft of interests. Scroller, consumer, influencee. That Fate gave me Viv as a daughter provides a daily fountain of dismay and delight.”
Adora herself grew up with a narcissistic, belittling mother who’s a bit like Lucille Bluth on “Arrested Development,” for which Semple used to write. Since her teens, Adora has self-diagnosed as one of the “fat, funny girls.” She makes jokes about her weight before anyone else can, like a stand-up comedian anticipating hecklers. Even before we learn the details of her back story, we know her optimism has been hard won: She has the quote “AMOR FATI” tattooed over a “faint vertical slash” on her wrist.
At the Ansonia, Adora leads a small, nonwitchy “coven” of single women who bought apartments on the same floor so they could share groceries, dog walkers and even hair color appointments — their hairstylist comes to their building to do all of their roots in one trip. “The idea is to grow old in curated company,” Adora tells a potential inductee. That’s some solid lifestyle marketing, and the woman’s response is pure can’t-help-herself Semple: “How lesbian are we talking?”
Adora makes her living by providing “moral training” to the 11-year-old twin sons of the Pritzker-rich, art-collecting Lockwood family on the Upper East Side. The parents, Lionel and Layla, are hoping that Lucien and Lorenzo might grow into something other than spoiled monsters. Meanwhile, Lionel is emotionally devastated after having lost an arm in a free-climbing accident in Aspen years ago. The hard-charging Layla will do anything to ease his suffering, including persuading the Louvre to open early so he can have a private audience with the legendarily armless Venus de Milo.
By the time you can keep the L names straight, you may have a cold compress on your forehead; but otherwise Semple’s satire of privilege and its soul mate, obliviousness, is delectable as always. (Layla brags about having stolen all of her household staffers, from the nurse to the chef, from the Mossad.)
And she gradually humanizes even second- and third-tier characters who might have been cardboard cutouts in someone else’s novel. With the shattered Lionel, Adora shares an especially poignant rapport. “I recognized the silent rage,” she says. “The black anvil of depression. The inexhaustible self-pity.”
The only character Semple can’t quite sell is, unfortunately, a pivotal one: a suave love interest named Digby who pretends to meet Adora by chance in the lobby of New York City Ballet, and woos her to get access to the Lockwoods. He and Adora have earthshaking, tide-changing sex — which, God bless — but it’s tough to root for Digby’s redemption when he’s been not just duplicitous, but tri-plicitous. Soon he’s lured her into a hectic mystery that involves the N.Y.P.D., the F.B.I., Interpol, a terrorist group and an ancient sculpture that Layla picked up on her travels.
Part of the appeal of Semple’s fiction has always been her wild plotting — she just keeps putting stuff in the blender. But sometimes the blender grinds and says, What, exactly, are we making?
A hundred pages into “Go Gentle,” the romance-novel love story collides disorientingly with the most convincing writing in the book as Semple flashes back to the ’90s, when Adora was a hopeful young writer for the sketch-comedy show “Laugh Riot” in Los Angeles. (Despite the location, the show is unmistakably patterned after “Saturday Night Live,” where Semple herself also previously worked.) It turns out that Adora was sexually assaulted by a star comedian during a high-stakes table read. He did it to win a bet with the other man-children in the cast, who tried to high-five Adora in the hallway afterward.
What Semple has written here about both the assault and the disempowerment that followed rings so true to Hollywood (and beyond) that, when we emerge from the 80-page flashback into the Lockwoods’ sitting room, it takes time to re-acclimate to a comic plot driven by epic misunderstandings.
The Stoics helped center Adora after she left “Laugh Riot,” and Semple clearly loves them herself. She threads their philosophy through the novel without getting too “Sophie’s World” about it. Epictetus and the gang would all have cold compresses on their foreheads if they saw how often Adora abandons reason and plunges into things beyond her control during the art-heist mystery, but they would approve of the coven — “live for thy neighbor if thou wouldst live for thyself,” Seneca taught.
All of Semple’s novels are at least Stoic-adjacent: empathetic odes to how absurdly harried our lives are, how we make them even knottier with our bad decisions and how love can be an excellent over-the-counter pain medication. Even in this sometimes vexing novel, you relish the warmth of the author’s vision and ultimately get on board with her can’t-stop-won’t-stop mischief. To quote a woman who’s grown to admire Adora by the end of the novel, “I am joining your coven.”
GO GENTLE | By Maria Semple | Putnam | 369 pp. | $30
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