In Lore Segal’s An Absence of Cousins, Nat Cohn, a fellow at the Concordance Institute, a small college in Connecticut, browses through a children’s novel during a staff meeting and exclaims: ‘We don’t write stories like this any more. Chronic plot deficiency is our problem.’
The problem for contemporary novelists is that tightly woven plots of cause and effect belie the way their readers experience the world. Like her compatriot Elizabeth Strout in Olive Kitteridge and Olive Again, Segal addresses it by featuring a single protagonist, Ilka Weisz, a young Austrian émigrée, and various recurring subsidiary characters, in a series of closely interlinked stories.
Many of these first appeared in the New Yorker and all were collected in Shakespeare’s Kitchen (2008) – the Shakespeare in question being either Leslie, the Institute’s director, or Eliza, his brash, outspoken wife, who take Ilka under their wing when she moves to Concordance from New York.
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