Go Gentle by Maria Semple

By Simon Demetriou

I’m pretty sure I’ve never described a book as rollicking before. Rollicking isn’t typically one of my words. But Go Gentle is rollicking. And I’m incredibly glad to have been rollicked by a novel as funny and tender and erudite and knowingly silly as Maria Semple’s latest.

Adora Hazzard has started a coven. But she’s not a witch; she’s a stoic philosopher. And here’s the sales pitch: ‘We want women like us… Women who, despite our age, share a dirty little secret: we’re just getting started… Plus, we get to die at home. Plus, we’re not a burden to our kids. Plus, no Florida. Plus, compared to nursing homes, it’s a huge money saver. Covens: you can’t afford not to!’

This part of the book’s premise, and the shimmering wit with which it is delivered, seem to be setting up for a gloriously comic elevation of accomplished fifty-something female divorcees and/or a satiric excoriation of a society in which women in that position have a preposterously high chance of dying alone while their male equivalents are usually re-married within a couple of years.

And Go Gentle kind of is that. But it’s also an international art heist thriller and a romantic comedy and a meditation on the place that stoicism and virtue might have in living a good life in 2026.

When a tall, dark, handsome and mysterious stranger enters Adora’s life and upends the good thing she’s got going as personal philosopher to one of New York’s wealthiest families, the reader also gets upended as we’re whizzed along through a world of devious French aristocrats, art-terrorists, landscape-gardeners-cum-Interpol-agents, and mega-rich carrot farmers atoning for past sins.

If that sounds mad, that’s because it is. It’s also fascinating and tremendously fun. In fact, the only part of the novel that lags even a little is the section where Semple describes the rise and fall of Adora’s marriage. Plot-wise, it’s perhaps the most plausible part of the book. The problem is that her ex, Hal, is the novel’s least resonant character, and there’s really only one truly significant moment in this section, which could probably have been alternatively engineered.

Ultimately, it is Semple’s madder characters who shine brightest, and her madder plotting that the reader really engages with. And the real joy is that we not only get to learn some very cool quotations by Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and Epictetus as we go, we also arrive with Adora at the moving realisation that the gap in Stoicism is the failure to find a satisfactory place for romantic and maternal love. I know nothing about Stoicism, so can’t tell you if this is true. But Semple makes it feel true, and that’s more than enough.