This month, if you read just one former “Arrested Development” writer’s comic novel about a woman who used to write for TV but has shifted gears, make it “Go Gentle.”
Weirdly, two novels that fit that description are out in the span of a week: “Go Gentle” is by Maria Semple, whose “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” was a blockbuster and book club favorite in 2012. “Like This, But Funnier” is a debut novel by Hallie Cantor. In both new books, lingering trauma from the authors’ time in TV (although not specifically “Arrested Development”) informs the story.
Cantor’s book is about Caroline, who fights misogyny and Hollywood bureaucracy as she attempts to pitch her own idea for a TV series and to turn a terrible book into a series she’d be willing to put her name on. Cantor is a funny and sometimes insightful writer. (Caroline, who’s ambivalent about having a baby with her long-suffering husband, observes of parenting, “The only way forward was to uphold the lie that it was the greatest thing ever and hope more people fell for it so you weren’t alone, and then pressure your kids to have kids so you could be a grandparent. Parenting was the ultimate pyramid scheme.”)
Unfortunately, Cantor overestimates how much we’ll care about the minutiae of TV production – which is explored in exhaustive detail – and overcommits to an extended metaphor about Caroline’s bathroom difficulties. In both cases, less would be so much more.
“Go Gentle” is weirder and more ambitious than Semple’s previous books (she also wrote “Today Will Be Different”). You need to buckle in and surrender to the farcical tale of Adora, who wrote for TV until she was sexually abused and used a settlement to become a, believe it or not, philosopher. She and her daughter now live in New York, where she leads a “coven” of single women/neighbors, teaches Stoicism to a wealthy family, dips her toe into a romance with a shadowy guy who might be a spy and becomes embroiled in an art-world conspiracy and a global arms deal.
It’s a lot and it’s often difficult to keep track of what’s going on but I didn’t mind because Semple has such an agile brain. Like “Arrested Development,” “Go Gentle” is packed with jokes (“Layla was a young, natural beauty who was nevertheless doing more than her part to keep thriving the injectable economy”) but the element of the novel that works surprisingly well is – wait for it – the philosophy.
Adora’s lessons are an oddly entertaining intro to real-world applications of lessons from Descartes and Sophocles. Turns out those old dudes are surprisingly relatable (much more so than, for instance, how a writing room on a TV show is organized in “Like This”), especially when they’re juxtaposed with jokes about Taylor Swift and “Emily in Paris.”
“Go Gentle” is not what anyone would call a disciplined book. There’s a sense that it is racing almost as fast as Semple’s mind and that she occasionally forgets that we’re not in there with her, which is why a couple of the supporting characters are hard to keep track of. And the subplots do pile up. But, as Semple tells us that Seneca said, “Nothing is heavy if you take it lightly.”
There’s more heavy stuff than you’d expect in “Go Gentle,” but Semple frappes it all together into a wild ride of a book that’s delightful while you’re reading it and that lingers long after you’re done.
