Shakespeare’s Kitchen by Lore Segal
mark beyer
The messy novel—a.k.a. linked short stories that give bulk page count and character depth to otherwise stand-alone stories—works when the characters are both interesting and multi-faceted, when the stories create a bond that reaches beyond the stand-alone anecdote. Alas, I didn’t feel the reader got this with Segal’s book. Sure, there was an arc to the story, but it rested on these short sketches that did not in fact have stand-alone power; more damning, they too often did not have drama in them, or too often lacked defined characters who had little to lose and less to gain from their actions. In other words, I kept waiting for something to happen, and little did; and when something did happen, the characters seldom moved to resolve conflict, or even to make the conflict more inflamed (the very definition of drama), which could have made the story, and the characters, far more interesting than either achieved.
The stories revolve around Ilka Weisz, a junior associate at the Concordance Institute, a Connecticut think tank filled with the typical quirky, neurotic characters one can find at such places—or anywhere in society, which I see is the author’s point. Ilka is befriended by Leslie and Eliza Shakespeare (Leslie is the think tank director; Eliza a fellow), who invite her (and others) to Sunday brunches, dinners, and lunches at the Shakespeare house. Within this coterie, the group dynamic exposes itself in a series of short vignettes that touch on crime, class warfare, inept colleagues, friendship, marriage, rivalries, love, children, and death.
Ilka is a sassy sort of woman who can, basically, argue and think with the best of the so-called powerhouse thinkers around her. Yet here lies part of the problem I have with the story. We don’t really know who these powerhouse thinkers are, nor do we ever get a firm grip on who Ilka is, what she wants, why she’s there, and so I kept wondering why she did certain things, like allow a man to move in with her who, by all rights (not the least of which turns on his being an inept person), had no business being with Ilka—and later she even marries the guy, but even that decision (and the marriage) is told to us in just a few sentences.
At the institute and within the Shakespeare home, all these people do is talk, bitch, and argue, but none of the conversation is brought to a head, and so nothing (or at least little) is resolved. Reading these vignettes—and this is all they are—one gets the sense of being left out of the joke, or a feeling having been sat in a screening room and shown scenes from an upcoming movie where every scene is cut just when something interesting can happen. I kept asking myself, Who are these people? Not what they looked like (we get that); not what they talk about (we get that); and not even what the hell the Concordance Institute does (we don’t get that). I was repeating the question to myself because I just couldn’t get a handle on the interconnection between the eight or ten characters. And I couldn’t define them because none have any real depth. They are cookie cut outs; cartoon characters; single-dimensional slaves to the author’s whimsical plot zigs and zags.
As the action takes place mostly within the Shakespeares’ kitchen, we are fed a healthy dose of Eliza Shakespeare. Eliza is perhaps the most visible character in the story, but she is also the failure of the story, in my opinion. Eliza is annoying. As annoying characters go, they can be great for fiction, unless they have no other traits or humanness about them to offer depth (every character in Shakespeare’s Kitchen is annoying; not “annoyingly cute” or “annoyingly daring” or “annoyingly charming” but exhaustingly annoying). Segal tries to add depth to Eliza by giving her a baby that has gone missing these past fifteen years. The ploy doesn’t work for long, because Eliza brings up her missing baby too often, and at the most inappropriate moments. Such characterization rises to the level of hyper-realism, a term James Wood famously described as taking a character trait (or fault), or situation, far over the top, so that readers presented with bizarre plots filled with outlandish characters.
For example, Eliza Shakespeare comes through as the typical high-energy academic, take-no-prisoners friend, and shrew-like wife. Many of us know the type, we can pick them out in the crowded room of our own hosted parties, and all you might have to do is substitute “academic” with CEO, or “friend” with office colleague, or “wife” with lover. However, Segal elevates the traits, faults and attitudes that go along with these otherwise normal description, with results that make Eliza Shakespeare an obsessive compulsive, a back-stabber, a kook. Let’s see Eliza in action. First, we find her up in arms because a homeless guy roots through her garbage:
They walked into the living room where Eliza said, “Leslie! The garbage thief!” and went to the window and banged on it. “Leslie!”
Leslie had sat down on the couch. Ilka wanted to go and sit beside him but she went and stood beside Eliza who was pummeling the glass. “What our Mrs. Coots calls ‘the element,’” Eliza said. The garbage thief was a black man dressed in layers of black and dust, tall and thin, a pin head with a pronounced Adam’s apple and no chin. Ilka had expected an old bum but the garbage thief was a young man. His long length curved into an “S” over the Shakespeare’s garbage with soft knees, whipping on the balls of his feet in rather the way Eliza, in her kitchen, bent over her cutting and chopping. The man leaned suddenly all the way into the can.
“He’s thorough,” Ilka said.
The young man stirred with a two-armed motion bringing the things at the bottom of the garbage can to the surface. Large or opaque objects which might hide treasure below he threw over the sides.
“On my sidewalk!” said Eliza.
It’s not your sidewalk, is what Ilka wanted to, but did not, say.
“Call the police.”
Ilka did not say, He’s not doing anything illegal! This was in the early, wooing days of the friendship between Ilka and the Shakespeares, and Eliza was older than Ilka by some fifteen years and the Director’s Wife.
“You threw out your pigskin driving gloves?” Eliza said to Leslie.
“The left glove. I lost the right one.”
“What if you find it?”
“That’s what you said last year. Eliza, come and sit down.”
“Sanitation is never going to pick up the mess!”
“I will pick up when he’s gone.”
“And I will help you,” Ilka said.
Segal writes sound narrative. The description of the garbage picker at work is fine stuff. So too is the foil she creates in Ilka to oppose Eliza. Feel the difference between Eliza’s exclamatory-rich dialogue and Ilka’s reasonable-minded reaction to the same event (not to mention the mild-mannered Leslie). On the other hand, Eliza is an over-the-top nutsoid; again, it’s not that an over-the-top character should not exist, but Eliza is over the top in all manner of humanness. Here’s another look at Eliza, from the category of “functioning in the world”:
On Sunday, when Ilka came to brunch at the Shakespeare’s, Eliza had her Supermarket Adventure to relate: Eliza said she had run in and made straight for household items, imagining the policeman waiting by her car with a parking ticket. “I scanned those clever little packaged items, found my spatula, raced to the checkout: long, long line. Woman in front of the woman in front of me had a full basket. In 10 Items or Less! It’s a wicked world. The woman with the full basket wrote out the slowest check in history. I imagined myself telling the policeman, ‘I thought, officer, parking was legal around this corner!’ and I imagined you,” Eliza said to Leslie, “saying, ‘Dear, but that is not the truth!’ and imagined the pleasure of kicking you in the shins.” Ilka was studying Leslie. He was concentrating on the management of an overripe peach.
“The checkout girl,” continued Eliza, “called for a manager to O.K. the check. No manger in sight, of course. The checkout girl walked away to look for the manager and I walked out of the supermarket with my sixty-nine-cent spatula, raced to my car which was standing, quiet as it could be, illegally, where I had parked it. I’m wanting to get out of there. Where are my car keys? Where is my handbag? It is not slung over my right shoulder where it is supposed to be. Now, I remember the girl from the project standing in the line behind me.”
Ilka and Eliza were friends in the habit of arguing. Eliza had to know this was going to activate Ilka. Ilka asked Eliza how she knew the girl was from the project.
Eliza said, “She was black.”
“How do you know the black girl took your handbag?”
“Because when I walked into the checkout line I had my handbag slung over my shoulder and when I got outside I didn’t have it.”
“Eliza! Eliza, you don’t know the girl took it!”
“So where is it? Where are my keys? Where is my wallet with my money, credit cards, driver’s license?”
“Eliza! Leslie!” pleaded Ilka, “don’t you have to presume the girl innocent till proven guilty …”
But Leslie stood at the sink with his back to both women, washing his hands clean of peach juice.
“ ‘Innocent till proven guilty!’ Interesting idea,” said Eliza and added, “Why don’t you stay? The Bernstines and the Stones are coming over.”
“Wonderful!” said Ilka.
Beyond the unhinged quality of Eliza’s mind (the book is replete with such characterizing), what we do not have here are complete “stories” even as Segal has leafed them into the book. Both the quote scenes above are whole chapters, yet I ask you, Where is the story? Where is the middle and endings? They are beginnings of story, and even beginnings of the middle of stories, but they are far from complete. At best, they are vignettes, fast stage productions placed on the page but without the critically needed punch that a powerful ending requires. Length has nothing to do with an ability to tell a powerful story. Read Chekhov, read Lawrence, read Welty and Boyle and McCarthy, read early Updike. Shakespeare’s Kitchen has none of the power because we get what I mentioned earlier: the lack of story progress or resolution. In fact, I’ll argue further that nothing really happens in any of these scenes besides added characterization points that only better define the characters as cartoons, without depth or the vital differences of emotional degrees, like thermal layers of an ocean, to make any of them human.
An isolated event — take the “Eliza has her purse stolen” scene — is not action unless there is some reaction. Can we say that Ilka’s argument against Eliza’s pointing the finger at the black woman is reaction? Perhaps, but essentially it takes us nowhere. Eliza puts Ilka’s argument into a pejorative comment on America’s flawed justice system, and then moves on to the next topic — which is the oft-repeated topic of inviting her to stay for dinner-lunch-brunch-drinks.
Where Eliza represents the over-the-top hyper-realist, her husband, Leslie, is the hyper-realist in antipodal fashion. Nothing upsets him, he doesn’t argue with Eliza, he allows her to question him ad-nauseam, allows her to belittle him. Not a peep from this man. Of course, we don’t want any certain reality to our fiction reading, at least not one that mirrors our life, but we also don’t want a completely unrealistic character representation. I don’t care how careful a husband is with his wife, or vise-versa, because after awhile the nit-picking, the wild intellectual rages, the unbalanced behavior, requires a fast, hard look and an unmitigated “Will you just shut up!”
Ultimately, Ilka is little better to follow through the story. I wanted to like her, but she came off as the author’s neat (too neat) story trick that glues all the nuts together. I wanted to look at the book as farce, a self-delusional ploy to get me “into” the fun that these the people were having bitching about the world, about missing lamps, about wanting a wall built around the university to keep out the “project” people. But farce simply was nowhere to be found. The story and characters want to be farce, but the story and characters stop just before either takes the chance to step over the line from hokum into that beatific madness that is farce. The result is gimmick, which moves quickly to annoyance. And there is no worse fate for a book than annoying its reader.
Shakespeare’s Kitchen by Lore Segal
The New Press
225 pages; $14.95
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