Ladies' Lunch and Other Stories by Lore Segal Review

I realise I’m far from the first person to learn the old adage “don’t judge a book by its cover” is a (mostly) solid truism, but I learned it once again with Lore Segal’s Ladies’ Lunch and Other Stories. I was drawn to it purely by Adrian Tomine’s lovely cover and, having never read anything by Lore Segal before, thought/hoped the contents might be similar to Tomine’s wonderful comics - Segal’s short stories are most definitely not!

The first half of the book follows a group of old ladies in New York who meet up every now and then to lunch and natter; the second half is an assortment of other stuff. I’m vague because Segal’s writing is kind of amazing in that it’s the sort of prose that you can barely grasp as you read it and immediately forget right after you’ve read it. The stories are so empty of anything substantial, interesting or remotely worth reading that they’re completely unimpressive.

I had to flick through the book again to remind myself what some of them were about. The ones that have a resemblance of a story are the title story, which is about one of the old ladies’ sons putting her in a nursing home after she loses her marbles, and Making Good, which is about a rabbi and a priest gathering some people together so they can all remember the Holocaust together. Pneumonia Chronicles seems to be a nonfiction piece about the author getting pneumonia during the pandemic.

I say “resemblance of a story” because nothing actually happens in any of the above beyond the flimsy premise: the old lady goes to the nursing home, the group talk about the Holocaust, the author recovers and leaves hospital. Nothing remarkable or unique or poignant is said or revealed. The whole book is like that: one big flatline.

Lore Segal is 95 years old so good for her still writing and publishing at that age, and, who knows, maybe the books she wrote earlier in her life from her 30s on were perhaps more memorable and stood out more; maybe this collection is an unintentional reflection of what happens to writers who make it to 95? Maybe not - maybe Segal’s prose has always been like this and I just don’t jibe with it (someone must - she’s frequently published in The New Yorker). Either way, I definitely wouldn’t recommend Ladies’ Lunch - I suggest admiring the cover and then putting it back on the shelf!