Woman on the Verge of Losing Control

Maria Semple’s “Go Gentle” ricochets from ancient philosophy to rom-com thrills

The Tuesday Review

(G.P. Putnam’s Sons)

Chances are good that Maria Semple’s Go Gentle will be the only zany comedy about Stoic philosophy published all year.

We haven’t heard from Semple, the celebrated author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette, in a decade, but we haven’t heard from Marcus Aurelius since A.D. 180, which puts her absence in perspective.

In any event, they’re both back now and raring to go.

Semple confesses in a note to readers that she recently went through a divorce and moved to New York while mothering “a fiery teenage girl.” Feeling “all ajumble” but creatively energized, she finally figured out how to write a thriller she’d started and abandoned many times before.

Go Gentle is that thriller, complete with international terrorists, arms deals, and glamorous spies, but it’s also a goofy romantic comedy, so it sometimes sounds like an episode of Sex and the City written by Dan Brown.

The narrator is Adora Hazzard, whose allegorical name is the first clue that this woman loves danger no matter what she claims about craving serenity. Indeed, spending a few days with this character may be the most exhilarating thing you can do for yourself this summer. Every morning she opens her eyes and tells the universe, “Surprise me.”

It obliges.

Divorced and raising a 15-year-old daughter in New York, Adora is that rare scholar whose work has reached the bestseller list. Her three translations of Stoic philosophy are credited with reintroducing classical wisdom “to our ailing, modern world.” Having tasted a bit of fame herself, Semple knows just how to lay it on: Obama chose Adora’s Meditations for his year-end list.

Ironically, Adora’s success may be the only element of Go Gentle that’s not entirely ridiculous. After all, Elaine Pagels got book clubs talking about the Gnostic Gospels, and next month Princeton University Press is releasing a gifty little translation of Seneca called How to Live: An Ancient Guide to a Happy Life.

If Adora has found the secret to contentment in the self-control of an ancient Roman philosopher, why shouldn’t she find a popular audience, too? Sure, she can be a “tranquility bully,” but who isn’t looking for the “secure joy” she’s peddling?

I asked Maria Semple whether writing Go Gentle made her more Stoic — or convinced her that Stoicism is impossible in real life.

One of her many fans is a fabulously wealthy scion of New York high society named Lionel Lockwood, he of the Lockwood Library on Fifth Avenue. Struggling with depression after losing an arm in a horrible accident, Lionel was inspired to keep living by Adora’s writings about the Stoics. (A private visit with Venus de Milo in the Louvre helped, too.) For the past five years, she’s been counseling Lionel and tutoring his twin boys on the wisdom of accepting what you cannot control and focusing on virtue above all else.

For a philosopher, it’s an exceptionally cushy gig.

For the heroine of a rom-com thriller, it’s a launching pad.

Because, of course, the opening of Go Gentle is a familiar feint: Adora is done with love. Having reached her mid-50s, she doesn’t need men anymore. (Not that she has a choice; even Demi Moore, she notes, is settling for someone “old and grizzled.”)

So, with stoic resolve, Adora starts assembling like-minded women “who present as scary” for a coven in her condo building. They’ll split grocery costs — Who can use a whole bag of celery? — and ensure they can “age in place and go out in a blaze of convivial independence.” It’s like a modern-day sequel to The Golden Girls. “I’m still surprised The New York Times hasn’t gotten in touch,” she says with her typical confidence. “Isn’t that all the Style Section is, breathless reporting on trends that barely exist?”

This feminist setup would surely have made its own amusing novel, but Semple — reaching back to Austen, Shakespeare, and even Plautus and his ancient farces — quickly shatters Adora’s resolve to do without romance. One minute she’s extolling the economic benefits of divvying up a loaf of bread with a fellow spinster, and the next minute she’s swooning over a handsome man whose “face looked expensively moisturized.”

As so often happens in these romantic encounters, this good-looking stranger sends Adora a burrito that’s mistaken for a bomb. That faux emergency sparks the evacuation of the Lockwood Library and plunges our stoic heroine into a diabolical plot involving blackmail, Nazis, stolen art, and the repressed trauma of writing for Saturday Night Live.

Suddenly, the woman who preached “freedom from desire” is dehydrating in a stranger’s hotel room and racing to save the world.

The title, Go Gentle, is clipped from a famous injunction by Dylan Thomas that appears in the novel’s epigraph, but for the life of me I can’t tell if this is an act of raging irony or a willful misreading of the poem because nothing about Thomas’s verse or Semple’s story has any patience with going gentle.

In fact, considering its discombobulated mix of elements, Go Gentle resembles one of those manic bake-off contests: You’ve got 30 minutes to make a soufflé from three pork rinds, a tub of Cool Whip, and a roll of pennies!

Although the plot involves Adora gradually discovering the limits of Stoicism, readers may want to brush up on Epictetus to keep calm amid all this comic chaos. It’s hard to imagine another writer getting away with this kitchen junk-drawer of a novel, but when a friend of our heroine asks, “Don’t we love Adora?” there’s only one thing to say: We do.◆

Go Gentle, by Maria Semple (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 384 pp., $30)

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