Maria Semple’s last two novels, Where’d You Go, Bernadette and Today Will Be Different, were both published to critical acclaim. The first, about an agoraphobic woman who leaves her family for Antarctica, was called an ‘instant classic’ by the New York Times and was turned into a film starring Cate Blanchett. 

Like her previous books, Semple’s new novel has a zany middle-aged mother at its heart. The narrator, Adora Hazzard, is a comedy writer turned Stoic philosopher who lives with her teenage daughter on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Adora tutors twin boys, the sons of Lionel and Layla Lockwood, an old-money couple who own a historic library and museum in the city. A series of unlikely events kicks off the novel: the British Museum is bombed, Layla Lockwood purchases a statue of dubious origins called Boy with Apple and Adora meets a dashing stranger called Digby at the ballet. These apparently unrelated events turn out to be intertwined. Soon, Digby is asking Adora to secretly deliver a letter to Layla Lockwood and the ‘elegant and aged curator’ who had doubts about Boy with Apple suddenly disappears. Go Gentle follows Adora as she tries to untangle this Da Vinci Code-like global art conspiracy.

This is a promising premise, but Semple’s style is oddly juvenile. Adora talks about ‘Seneca, an absolute beast’ and ‘my homie Voltaire’. She frequently uses slang that seems out of place and outdated (‘brittleness has entered the chat’) or speaks in clichés (‘we plunged straight into the depths of euphoria,’