Go Gentle by Maria Semple

Like most people, I know Maria Semple from Where’d You Go, Bernadette, which I loved, so it pains me to say that I slogged through Go Gentle. I went in expecting to be charmed all over again, and instead I spent a good portion of the book waiting for it to settle into something I could hold onto.

The opening is the best part, and it’s a great one. A group of aging neighbors who live on the same floor of an apartment building declare themselves a coven, and the purpose is wonderfully practical rather than mystical. They pool what they have, down to splitting a loaf of bread so half of it doesn’t go stale in someone’s kitchen. That premise taps into something real about getting older, where the practical details of living alone (food that goes to waste, things you can’t manage by yourself, a day that might pass without anyone knowing how you are) quietly become a question of who is paying attention to you. Psychologists have talked for years about how much community and small daily connections matter for our wellbeing as we age, and a coven built on shared groceries is a funny, warm way into that idea. I was fully on board and ready for a story about these people and the little society they build.

That story doesn’t really arrive. The coven fades into the background surprisingly early, and the book turns into something much bigger and more tangled than the premise promised. I don’t mind a story that takes a left turn, and plenty of good books do, but the shift here never felt like a deliberate pivot. It felt like the book abandoning its best idea for another one, and then possibly another after that. By the time I was deep in the middle, I couldn’t have told you what the central thread was supposed to be, and I wasn’t sure the book could either.

I kept hoping the ending would pull everything together and make the earlier chaos feel intentional. That’s the bargain I’m usually willing to make with a messy novel: confuse me now, reward me later. Go Gentle never held up its end of that deal for me. I finished with the sense that a lot had been thrown at the reader, and when I stepped back and asked what the book was actually about, I came up empty. I don’t mean that as a dramatic flourish. I genuinely tried to summarize it for myself afterward and kept getting stuck on which of the ideas was supposed to be the main one.

Another reader’s review put it better than I could, saying the book felt like the author had three different ideas and couldn’t decide which one to write, so she smushed them all together. I couldn’t agree more. Each idea might have worked on its own, and the coven alone could have carried a whole warm, funny novel about aging and community. Instead, they compete for space, and none of them gets enough room to land. The pacing suffers for it too, because every time the story picked up momentum, it changed direction and I had to reorient myself. That kind of constant resetting is tiring, and it kept me from getting attached to anyone on the page.

It doesn’t help that the description set me up for a different book. I don’t think the marketing is outright dishonest, but it leans on the charm of that opening premise, and a reader coming in for that charm will be disoriented by what follows. I’d take some responsibility for expectations, since a beloved earlier book from the same author is a heavy thing to carry into a new one. Still, even setting that aside, the problem wasn’t that the book was different from what I expected. The problem was that it was scattered, and scattered is hard to enjoy no matter what you were hoping for.

I wouldn’t tell anyone to avoid Go Gentle, because there’s clearly talent and wit underneath it, and that first stretch really is delightful. But I also wouldn’t go out of my way to recommend it. If you’re a devoted Semple fan who needs to read everything she writes, you’ll probably pick it up anyway, and I’d suggest lowering your expectations about how tightly it’s constructed. If you’re new to her, start with Where’d You Go, Bernadette instead. And if you love the idea of a found-family story about older neighbors looking out for each other, I’m sorry to say you may have to go find another book to get it.