Lore Segal in the world’s most likable author photo

Since my dear mother gave it to me for Christmas yesterday, I have read 92% of Half the Kingdom, Lore Segal’s new novel about an emergency room that gives senior citizens Alzheimer’s. Half the Kingdom is a literary comedy, in that it is about small but deeply felt moments between quirky, real-ish people rather than the other two things books can be about: multiple generations of an immigrant family or child wizards. Obviously, I like Half the Kingdom, because I read so much of it in a relatively short time. But there is also a problem with it, which I feel the following sentence encapsulates:

If you find, reader, that you are tired of Lucy looking for her glasses, think how tiresome it is for her.

Thus does one of our best contemporary authors fall into a rookie mistake.

I like Lore Segal. I really liked Shakespeare’s Kitchen, her terribly titled but terrifically observed 2008 collection of interrelated stories. Several of the characters from Shakespeare’s Kitchen and other of Segal’s works appear in Half the Kingdom. I was about to add “aged appropriately,” but I cannot decide if that is true or not.

All the major characters in Half the Kingdom are old except for two: Bethy, whom we will get to in a moment, and Benedict, who is introduced as not likely to date Bethy. The other main characters are conspicuously old, partly for reasons of plot mechanics and partly because oldness—not, I want to be clear, aging—is the central theme of the book.

If you find that you are tired of Lucy looking for her glasses, you are not the ideal reader of this book. Half the Kingdom is of the aging baby boomers, by an aging baby boomer, and for the aging baby boomer. Its observations about the lives of senior-citizen writers and academics in New York City are keen and satisfying, but if you want to take interest in a lot of the events on the ground, you must regard the ongoing search for your glasses as fundamental to the human experience.

The author does. So, it seems, does the reader she imagines. This 36 year-old Segal fan and lifelong myopic does not, and I feel a little excluded. A big part of that problem is Bethy, who is surely one of Segal’s flattest and least sympathetic characters.

Bethy is the adult daughter of Joe and Jenny Bernstein, two likable intellectuals from Shakespeare’s Kitchen. In that book, Joe and Jenny were certainly at defined stages in their lives, but their age was not their defining characteristic. In Half the Kingdom, though, characters are either old or not.

The ones who are not don’t get to be POV characters. They barely get to be characters at all; instead, they are parts in the alienating machine that is contemporary society. For no character is this more true than for Bethy. To the extent that Joe and Jenny are Old, Bethy is Young, and she functions both as a foil to her parents and as a synecdoche for the miserable world that misunderstands them.

Bethy is fat and negative. After her father briefly stops breathing, she screams at him for asking her to turn off the TV in his hospital room. Because Bethy is such a consistent archetype, she sucks the realism out of nearly every scene in which she participates. Consider this passage:

The intuition that Bethy would refuse to be amused by smiling mothers and their babies and taxi drivers with imaginative hearts made Jenny herself doubt their little charms so that she told her story badly. “You know the new neighbor on the sixth floor,” she asked Bethy, “who moved in a month ago?”

“So?” Bethy said.

What adult would respond to her mother in this way? For that matter, what English speaker greets a rhetorical question with “so?” Only Bethy, the daughter who cannot feel. Jenny goes on to relate an anecdote about said neighbor putting money in a stranger’s expired parking meter. Bethy does not understand the beauty of this gesture at all.

Maybe we shouldn’t, either. Putting money in a stranger’s parking meter is a familiar, movie-quality shorthand for altruism, the action equivalent of the phrase “random acts of kindness.” Given its triteness—which is more jarring in the hands of so inventive and specific a writer as Segal—there is reason to read the first sentence of the passage as meta-narrative commentary.

But Bethy’s hostility is so consistent and unnatural that we are forced to read it as reinforcement of her character. The problem is that characters in Half the Kingdom are divided into two groups: nuanced senior citizens and neurasthenic everyone else. When we are in the seniors’ heads or reading their dialogue, the novel is funny and sad—that is, real. When these seniors run up against characters of the second category, though, the story becomes an allegory.

Allegories almost always suck, and they are never funny. The allegory of Half the Kingdom is redeemed, to a degree, by the novel’s larger social question. To what degree are we prolonging lives by, as one character puts it, “Abu Ghraib” methods, only to imprison demented seniors in their worst years? But I don’t like Lore Segal for her social messages; I like her for her keen eye and bittersweet humor.

She writes about life when other authors write about stories, or worse yet about Modern Times. Half the Kingdom doesn’t have much of a story, but it evinces the older person’s distorted fixation on how things are now. It is the work of a master, but it is deeply flawed.

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