(The short story “On the Agenda” by Lore Segal appeared in the September 18th, 2023 issue of The New Yorker.)
Illustration by Riccardo Vecchio
“On the Agenda” by Lore Segal is an interesting exercise. I read it twice, enjoyed it both times, but I’m still wondering about the ending. Each time I read it, and I can’t put my finger on why, or where the example is in the story, but I kept thinking about French Absurdist one-act theatre. (I was a theatre major, I read a lot of their works.) Something about this story seemed to parallel that. This story isn’t blatantly absurdist. It does have a foot in reality, but there is something off, which works.
The story is about ladies who lunch, but not the Sondheim “ladies.” The story of these ladies is broken up into sections; the first being “JANUARY: THE FORGETTING OLYMPICS,” which also happens to be an agenda item for the meeting of the ladies. What if forgetting was an Olympic sport? And the ladies give examples of their forgetting, comparing, and expanding this idea. At this point, the story could be about aging. But with the next section “MARCH: NEXT TO GODLINESS” and “JUNE: FUNK” we are given examples of the ladies friendship, and how they are dealing with their forgetting. And again, it all feels purposefully off center, ever so slightly. But when the final section comes along, “NOVEMBER: NO MORE TRAINS” which is broken up into three sections, with the last being the one I questioned the most – It’s a single paragraph with no dialogue, which is different and shorter than all other sections of the whole story. This paragraph thuds the story to a close, help with a rhetorical last question “For now?”
From the way the story started with that absurdist feeling I had while reading, I never was expecting this to be a story that would wrap up cleanly, or even conclusively for that matter. But that last paragraph is completely and radically different from the rest of the story – what was the point? Then I remembered the French Absurdists, who sometimes made the point of not having a point, and just ending things.
Or it’s about death?
I’m going with death.
Matthew Groff 