Half the Kingdom is a tour de force for Lore Segal, the 85-year-old novelist and Pulitzer finalist (for 2007's Shakespeare's Kitchen). It can be appreciated from several points of view: as a serious indictment of the American medical system, a scathing commentary on the marginalization of the elderly or a sendup of sociological/medical "studies." It is all of the above--and a wicked good story as well.
Doctors at a Manhattan hospital have noticed a strange increase in patients presenting with Alzheimer's or dementia. They are fine one day and not so fine the next. Is it coincidence or a terrorist plot? The phenomenon must be investigated, and none better than Joe Bernstine to lead the study.
Joe, who's returned to New York with his wife, Jenny, after retiring from a Connecticut think tank, is currently concerned with end-of-the-world scenarios--concerned to the point of paranoia. He enlists his daughter, Bethy, and Benedict, the son of an old friend, to work with him. Says Benedict, upon learning that Joe has rented an office: "He needs this office to have his funny ideas in. And to make work for his pain-in-the-ass daughter." Computer whiz Al Lesser is the next hire; Lucy, an emphysemic, "barely e-mail literate" 75-year-old, rounds out the team.
Each of these characters has a story--as do all the patients they are interviewing--and Segal combines laughter and tears, pathos, real tragedy and comic relief in everyone's scenario. She never trivializes or makes fun of the very real pain and confusion these people are feeling. As meetings are called and canceled, medication given and withheld, all these disparate lives converge in the hospital's ER. Joe and Lucy also end up there--for reasons unknown, except that they are old and not very well (though "our vitals are good").
There is a story read by a visiting granddaughter about a lovely girl who runs away to the forest. "And even people who have not read, and never been told the story, know that the girl will marry the prince with the kind eyes," Segal writes. "They will inherit half the kingdom, and if they haven't died they are living to this hour." Segal's novel is a beautiful, down-to-earth tragicomic meditation on age, failing powers and the loss that comes to all of us. --Valerie Ryan
Shelf Talker: Segal (Other People's Houses) tells a tragicomic story about a team of researchers interviewing an alarming number of aging people with signs of sudden dementia.