When my father retired, my mother used to quote the wife of baseball great Casey Stengel: “I married him for better or for worse, but not for lunch.” Barbara, the heroine of Cynthia Holz’s new novel Semi-detached, obviously did the same. When the book opens she and Elliot have just divided their three-storey Toronto house after 32 years of marriage. She gets the first floor and basement, where she can work seriously at her ceramics. He gets the top two floors, where he can figure out what to do with his life, now that he’s retired from dentistry. No, they don’t want a divorce, they tell her mother, their two children, and their friends. It’s just time for a change. Barbara likes the idea better than Elliot: “Little things rankled; an accumulation of minor grievances over the years. The way he hated parties, for one … the sulking, and bickering, the half-hearted settlements.”

So, after a career of teaching and looking after others, she takes advantage of her new freedom to concentrate on making beautiful things. Elliot, on the other hand, does not adjust as easily as his wife does. Eventually he moves out, and into the arms of a lovely cooking teacher who is getting over her own marriage break-up.

Their kids (a divorced daughter with a precocious little girl, and a son married to a hyperactive doctor) don’t understand, and hope that they’ll get back together in time for their 35th wedding anniversary.

The premise sounds like that of a TV sitcom, a variation on The Golden Girls set north of the 49th parallel and with lots of snow. Things do end up happily, just like on TV, although it takes three years for Barbara and Elliot to find a new equilibrium.

Another thing my mother used to say was that the Devil finds work for idle hands. Elliot and Barbara, both in their early 50s when they quit their day jobs, suddenly find themselves with no financial worries, few demands on their time, and not much self-knowledge. Along with its humour, their story does have a moral: don’t retire too early, or you may find yourself in for some devilishly difficult times.