The Groves of Academe

SHAKESPEARE'S KITCHEN

Stories

By Lore Segal

New Press. 225 pp. $22.95

Lore Segal begins Shakespeare's Kitchen, her first major work of fiction in 20 years, with an "Author's Note" that makes her craft sound deceptively easy. In these 13 interlinked short stories (seven of which appeared in the New Yorker), "There is a protagonist, some main characters and a chorus of minor ones. . . . There is a theme: I was thinking about our need not only for family and sexual love and friendship but for a 'set' to belong to." But as the stories unspool and intertwine, one realizes that only in the hands of a master do a few vaguely defined characters and themes create such an exquisite tapestry.

The protagonist of Shakespeare's Kitchen is Ilka Weisz, a scrappy, opinionated Jewish refugee who has appeared in slightly different guises in Segal's earlier novels, Her First American and Other People's Houses. When she lands friendless at the Concordance Institute, a bucolic Connecticut think tank, she cross-examines her colleagues, seemingly contented with spouses, children and dogs. "How did all of you meet each other? I mean a new set of friends." Ilka is particularly smitten by the suave Institute director, Leslie Shakespeare, and his droll wife, Eliza.

The Shakespeares bestow their favor, inviting Ilka to breakfast every Sunday in their cozy kitchen, where Eliza dishes risotto and malicious stories about their friends. One Sunday, a bedraggled woman, one of their former favorites, pounds on the door, begging to be let back into the Shakespeares' kitchen. At that moment, Ilka realizes that her hosts will eventually grow bored with her opinions and banish her as well.

The "chorus of minor characters" is as vivid as Ilka and the Shakespeares. In "Money, Fame, and Beautiful Women," the poet Nathan Cohn, "a bulky man with a heavy tread" and an "enthusiastic" beard, wins the "Columbia Prize for Poetry" -- at least he thinks so. But at the grand prize ceremony aboard a yacht, he discovers that the invitation and the check are made out to a phantom poet named "Nathan H. Cones."

In "Reverse Bug" (which won an O. Henry Prize), Ilka invites her tongue-tied ESL students to the Institute's upcoming genocide symposium "with a wine and cheese reception." The symposium comes to a halt when a malfunctioning microphone produces a ghastly sound. The squirming audience gradually realizes it is the recorded screams from Dachau and Hiroshima, broadcast by one of Ilka's seemingly inarticulate students.

The cumulative power of Shakespeare's Kitchen lies in Segal's dazzling ability to merge the mundane details of life -- a missing pencil sharpener, a tipped-over garbage can -- with the arc of human emotions. Take, for example, a group of Concordance fellows stumbling into a summer evening after viewing a friend's corpse: "They stood a moment, they talked, not accounting to themselves for the intense charm of the summer hill rising behind Ilka's house, of standing, or breathing -- of the glamour of being alive."

-- Caroline Preston's most recent novel is "Gatsby's Girl."