April 27, 2026
Go Gentle, by Maria Semple
“It’s hard to imagine another writer getting away with this kitchen junk-drawer of a novel,” writes critic Ron Charles of Maria Semple’s latest, Go Gentle, and Charles means it in the best way. Because this isn’t your mother’s kitchen junk drawer, or your own, or anyone’s, instead a junk drawer that could only belong to the wondrous mind of Semple, as brilliant as it’s squirrelly, her narratives prone to sharp turns and unlikely diversions. Stoicism, 1990s’ comedy writing rooms, #MeToo, motherhood, covens, art heists, weird rich people, Central Park, the Louvre, bomb threats, secret agents, divorce, hot sex, success, and failure.
Go Gentle is the story of Adorra Hazzard, a mid-life divorcee, and a Stoic philosopher who lives on New York’s Upper West Side and is populating the units in her apartment with like-minded women so that she can form a coven. But then she meets a man one night at the opera, and the whole world becomes unhinged after that, Adorra cut up in an international plot (or is she just imagining things) that somehow ties back to her earlier career as a comedy writer before sexual assault by a colleague and an NDA put an end to that part of her life for good.
If you’ve never read Semple before, you’ll likely read this book, and wonder what’s going on here, and I certainly did the same sometimes—Semple throws her reader into the deep end, no hand-holding, it’s up to us to find our bearings, and there were moments when I was lost and confused. There is such a breeziness to her narrative voice that I’m compelled to fly through it, but there is some method to the madness and details that need to be attended to. (Up until the novel’s last page, I’d missed the cameo from the protagonist of Semple’s breakout hit, Where’d You Go, Bernadette?)
I’m the last person to read Maria Semple critically—Bernadette was a game changer for me as both a reader and a writer, and I’d follow her sentences anywhere. I loved this book, because I love everything she does—and I’ve also found her weird twisty books give bang for their buck, just as revelatory and fun to read a second time.
