Half the Kingdom

August 12, 2013
The 85-year-old Lore Segal’s latest offering is a slim novel haunted by a specter worse than death: the loss of one’s mind. Joe Bernstine is the retired director of the Concordance Center, a think tank devoted to eschatology. As Joe’s own personal end draws near, he assembles an eclectic team of family and associates for one final project, The Compendium of End-of-World Scenarios, an encyclopedic catalogue of potential doom. Yet, as his team gets drawn into assisting Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in dealing with its recent rash of “copycat Alzheimer’s” (which has mysteriously struck all of the 62-plus patients who entered its ER with debilitating dementia), their own problems manifest. Joe has his family and associates enter the hospital in an attempt to decipher the mystery from within. The novel is structured in short sections, each titled after the character it follows, such as “Ida Farkasz” or “Francis Rhinelander,” and, aside from one mention of 9/11, it seems as if the book was written in the 1970s and preserved in amber. By weaving together the multiple narratives of those suffering from and fighting the epidemic, Segal’s story is both a disjointed and comprehensive tableau of the inevitable cruelty of mortality, or as one character puts it, “the Arbus Factor of old age.”

September 15, 2013
Is dementia catching? The possibility sends one emergency room into a tizzy in Segal's latest, a surreal black comedy. It's Miriam Haddad, an ER doctor, who lets the cat out of the bag. She confides to Joe Bernstine, a regular patient, that they're tracking "all the sixty-two-pluses who go around the bend." Smiling Joe is unfazed. Nothing fazes Joe, not even the fact that he's terminal. He's the retired director of a think tank that figured prominently in Segal's previous novel, Shakespeare's Kitchen (2007), and is busy cataloging, in his small Manhattan office, end-of-the-world scenarios. His staff consists of family and friends, most notably Lucy, a 75-year-old poet with emphysema. It's she who notices the body hurtling past the window. One of the black dressmakers whose space they acquired has committed suicide after taking her sister to the same New York hospital ER where Joe is a frequent visitor. Soon, Joe's outfit is working with Dr. Haddad to investigate the staggering surge in Alzheimer's cases. Joe has hinted that undefined "entities" may be using the ER to create an epidemic. Stated that baldly, it sounds pretty silly, but then, this is not a conventional medical-disaster novel, but a wild flight, complete with loops, tangents and quizzical asides. What follows is a parade of new intakes, all about to lose their minds. Observing them unofficially is Lucy, who is being driven crazy herself by the refusal of a magazine to pass judgment on a months-old submission. Back to Dr. Haddad, who, as the hospital's spokesperson, declares "[t]here is no emergency room...that is not liable to raise the stress level to one that can cause temporary dementia." That exposes Segal's debunking of the Byzantine bureaucracy of the American hospital, but it does not prepare readers for the dark ending: a tableau of the demented, all stark naked, and Joe on his deathbed. A sassy circumnavigation of hospital culture and mortality.

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Starred review from September 15, 2013
The staff of Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in New York have noticed a dramatic increase in the number of dementia patients. Apparently, people who seem perfectly clearheaded one day arrive at the hospital's emergency room the next with advanced Alzheimer's. Are these sudden, dramatic symptoms the results of the normal aging process or some kind of terrorist plot? To answer this question is the task of Joe Bernstine, the retired director of a Connecticut think tank. Joe has developed an increasing obsession with growing old and has taken on a new project, to compile the world's first encyclopedia of end-of-the-world scenarios. Joe has gathered an eclectic cast of characters to help him collect data, including his cantankerous daughter, Bethy, and Lucy Feingold, the widow of his friend, Bernie, who herself will end up wandering the halls of the dreaded hospital. Segal, Pulitzer Prize nominee for Shakespeare's Kitchen (2007), has collected a very disparate group of people and expertly tied them together. With masterful dialogue and a good dose of black humor, she creates characters that are both easily recognizable and refreshingly new. Funny, sad, and at times deeply moving, Half the Kingdom is a fascinating novel, a well-crafted, meaningful examination of life and death and all that lies in between.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)