I have been reading Lore Segal’s stories in the new collection, Shakespeare’s Kitchen. These are delicate stories, subtle and fine, and what interests me most is the way in which they resist the customary blandishments of plotting. I’m not saying anything original here; at least two reviewers have noticed this in different ways:

Sue Halpern in the NYTBR writes:

In the introduction to “Shakespeare’s Kitchen,” Lore Segal’s charming novel disguised as a book of short stories, the author offers an apology for not writing a more conventional narrative. Describing a meeting with a film producer who tells her that “in a good plot nothing happens that is not the result of what happened before or the cause of what happens next,” she says, “I like reading stories like that, but I don’t write them because that’s not how life happens to me or to the people I know.”

And James Marcus, in the LA Times, has this acute observation:

Segal is an enchanting storyteller. An old hand at dodging sentimentality — who else could have transformed her childhood expulsion from Hitler’s Europe into such a dry and delightful tale, as she did in “Other People’s Houses”? — she compels our attention without ever asking for it. Perhaps that is her secret: She never does ask; she maintains a dignified distance from the reader.

In any case, her oddly telescoping paragraphs are impossible to resist. We read them, we read them again, and we are reminded of Eliza’s crabby comment halfway through the book: “My idea of hell is a child telling you the plot of a story.” Nobody who has ever undergone such an ordeal will disagree. But my idea of heaven is a brilliant adult doing the very same thing, and that’s what we get in “Shakespeare’s Kitchen.”

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