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6 hours ago
5
What would Marcus Aurelius have made of the Kardashians? Would Seneca have been amused by mindfulness apps? These were questions I had never consciously pondered before reading Maria Semple’s new novel. Neither, in my irrational and unvirtuous state, had I spent much time considering the application of Stoic philosophy to any other key aspects of modern life.
Semple, best known for her exuberant, ingenious bestseller Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, here presents us with Adora Hazzard, Stoic philosopher and divorcee. Adora lives a contented life on New York City’s Upper West Side, spending her days tutoring the twin sons of an old-money family in philosophy and seeking to live according to Stoic virtues, without recourse to destabilising “externals”. But her settled life is soon disrupted by that most classic of externals, the handsome stranger. “Curse these alluring men who throw us off our game!” (Marcus Aurelius, paraphrased.)
What follows is tricky to categorise. Is it a knockabout comedy about the collective power of midlife women? (No, it isn’t, though it seems to gesture in that direction at the start.) An art heist caper? (Sort of.) A thriller? (A bit.) A romcom? (Sort of, I guess?) A cry of female rage? (Briefly.) A paean to the virtuous joys of Stoic philosophy? (100% yes!) Ultimately Semple seems to have resolved not to agonise over genre for too long. We could look at this as a gift: several books for the price of one.
Stoicism is not traditionally – I know this won’t hurt Marcus Aurelius’s feelings – very sexy, but Semple makes it feel fresh and exciting. Reflecting on a conversation with another character, Adora says, “I was all over the place. Which is what happens when I get started on Stoicism. Fuelled by enthusiasm, I talk faster and faster, bouncing between subjects, repeating myself. It’s like running downhill. … All I can do is keep going and pray I’ve got a shred of dignity left when I reach the bottom.” Adora’s enthusiasm is contagious. For some time after finishing the book, I found myself murmuring, when encountering a mishap, “The cucumber is bitter. Throw it away.” (Marcus Aurelius again.)
And Semple writes with immense charm. The book fizzes with funny lines, as when Adora remarks of one incidental character, with startling specificity, “His face looked weirdly polished, like a Polly Pocket doll that had been licked.” The madcap energy works well for long stretches of the book. Characters come and go. We get to know some of them. Plotlines come and go. We’re able to follow some of them. It’s buoyant and fun.
But at times this merry chaos tips over into a less satisfying disjointedness. There is a clunky section in which the deterioration of Adora’s marriage is charted through time-stamped nuggets, anchored to a whistlestop tour of the big hits from the recent political landscape: “Spring of 2016: I got swept up in Bernie mania”; “September of 2018: #MeToo erupts”, and so on through Brett Kavanaugh, Trump, George Floyd, the riots, some of these elements thematically pertinent but none given enough space in the narrative to feel properly relevant. Meanwhile, Adora’s ex-husband Hal is not fleshed out enough for us to care much about either the beginning or end of the marriage.
Elsewhere, Semple’s energy and economy with backstory are brilliantly deployed, as in the fast and harrowing account of Adora’s ill-fated career as a comedy writer. This compelling section is, in some ways, the centre of the novel (I’m hedging here because Adora’s embrace of Stoicism leads her to reframe how she views this episode), and its strongest element.
The book is a zany high-wire act and the main plot, which at times seemed like a shaggy dog story, is ingeniously wrapped up at the end. For me, the whole doesn’t really cohere, but as Marcus Aurelius said, everything is perspective, not truth. I felt both cleverer and sillier after finishing this book, which is a lovely way to be left.
