I was thrilled on starting Maria Semple’s Go Gentle to see an idea C. and I have bandied about for year – a ‘coven’ of women looking after one another – made literal. Adora, our protagonist, has cultivated an apartment building full of independent women who are committed to living their fully-realized, independent lives, while also looking out for one another (as they are and as they age). Here it is, I thought, the expression of every adult woman’s secret fantasy of a life led where the countertop is clean and self-actualization has come from a sense of worthiness owed only to existence rather than… anything or anyone else.
I suppose I should have been warier on reading the glaring plot hole that is Adora’s financially successful career as a… consulting philosopher. Cue the legit lol. But yes, of course, the extremely wealthy family (or AI company) must have a philosopher on staff to advise on the moral questions of the day. But of course.
And you know, Adora’s particular brand of Stoic self-discipline will find cultural resonance. And the plot – such as it is – invites some delightful romps through art heists and FBI raids and descriptions of billionaire mansions that we all just love to read.
There’s a not unserious section on the #metoo moment of Adora being sexually assaulted on the job and signing the NDA and taking the hush money. And were it not for the absolutely incongruous idea of Adora as a comedy writer turned Stoic philosopher (which, okay, in itself isn’t an unbelievable change, just that the novel does not offer Any Accounting for This Character Development) the section might have offered something more than a bizarre sense that this was what the book was meant to be ‘about’ and that this was ‘serious stuff’.
Only then do we land on the romance. The kind where Adora is finally – finally – complete. Because she finds a man. A man who gets her and always has and with whom she can be fully herself. And barf gag barf. Oh it’s hard. As someone who now has a partner with whom I finally and can fully be myself I don’t mean to downplay the Yes! of discovering that there is another person with whom you can love and be loved. It *is both a surprise and a joy. But it is also not the prerequisite for connection and joy. And in another book, I’d be all for this kind of celebratory character arc. But come onnnnn: in a book that opens with the promise of connection in and through women-caring-for-women to end with a woman-saved-by-the-love-of-a-man… just… ugh.
Oh and I know you’ll tell me that Adora continues to express herself as an independent woman simply “augmented” by this love. Where ‘giving in’ to love is in the titular expression “going gentle” in lieu, I suppose of a feminist “rage” that insists on independence and contemplates the idea that community might be All By Itself a worthy construct for meaning. Lol lol. And you’re right, that’s what the book tries to sell us in its closing. AND YET if ever the marketing pitch team for hetero-monogamy* is in search of a sell-piece, I offer you Go Gentle.
Literary Vice 