LADIES' LUNCH

Deceptively simple stories about older women who meet for lunch.

In her latest collection, Segal, now in her mid-90s, displays a seemingly effortless sense of lightness—even effervescence. These are not stories that strain toward their subjects in agony. They glide with a cleareyed calm and the grace of a writer’s lifelong career to inform them. The book’s first part is made up of a sequence of whisper-thin stories about a group of elderly women who meet every month or so for lunch. It doesn’t feel too presumptuous, going by their conversation and characteristics, to assume these women are loosely based on Segal and her own friends. They chat about topics that are light and topics that are less so. “Our children would not believe how calmly we look around the table wondering which one of us will be next,” Bessie says in one. In the book’s second part, Segal branches out a bit to revisit some of the material that has appeared in her work previously: fleeing Nazi-occupied Vienna as a 10-year-old, for example. Then, too, there are charming and bittersweet stories like the three-page “Divorce,” in which Lilly calls Henry to ask, “ ‘Can you remember exactly why we got divorced?’ ‘You always think things can be explained exactly,’ said Henry. ‘Oh, really!’ she said. ‘Is this one of the things that I “always” think?’ ” It isn’t just that Segal has a fantastic ear for dialogue, a magnificent wit, and an apparently infinite patience for her characters, who can be, as we all can, grumpy, difficult, forgetful, and argumentative. At this point in her career, Segal’s confidence in her own narrative ability is such that she allows her grasp to loosen to glorious effect. These are stories as light as air, as life itself, and yet they go on reverberating afterward.

Gemlike stories from a master of the form.