The Age of Senescence
Emily Cooke

Half the Kingdom:
A Novel
by Lore Segal
Melville House
$23.95 List Price
In 1976 Lore Segal published a short, fabulist satire of literary New York, narrated by a wide-eyed poet, Lucinella, who charges from one party to the next, directing her considerable wit cruelly inward, at her own ambitions and doubts, and affectionately outward, at her striving intellectual friends. In its brevity, its free handling of time, and its lightheartedness, Lucinella almost resembles Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, while the clipped narrative rhythms and wry high-low style bring to mind Grace Paley. The talk is emphatic, exclamatory. The characters’ last names are silly (“Winterneet,” “Betterwheatling”), and the humor tends toward exaggerated self-deprecation. Profound themes—the shortness of life, the fragility of the ego—run through alternately absurd and commonplace events: Lucinella meets her future husband, William, at Yaddo, gets her floors redone, has an affair with the god Zeus. Meanwhile, William gets a poem rejected from “The Magazine,” feels hurt by a snub from a more famous writer, and, in the most affecting bit of fabulism, runs off with “Young Lucinella,” a copy of his wife at twenty. Present-day Lucinella also encounters frowsy “Old Lucinella,” a poet who “used to be good in a minor way.” Her elderly incarnation horrifies her: “How can she bear it! . . . To be old, and minor!”
Thirty-seven years hence, Segal herself is old but not so minor. Over the course of a long career—she is now eighty-five—she has written in two modes, one comic and one serious, which she has mixed in varying ratios and with varying degrees of success. Her most powerful book
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