Half the Kingdom by Lore Segal

In 1985, The New York Times declared that Lore Segal was "closer than anyone to writing the Great American Novel." Not only is this bewildering, it's harmful: if that race didn't end with Melville, it'll never end, and to burden someone with such an impossible task is to set them up for certain failure. Unfortunately, her latest novel doesn't just fall short of Moby-Dick – it falls short of Pierre.

Joe Bernstine, an ageing eschatology buff, has assembled a team to compile The Compendium of End-of-World Scenarios. Soon, however, his team are roped into assisting a local hospital with a strange Alzheimer's 'outbreak.' One by one they interview the victims, and one by one we're introduced to new characters. It's a creaky contrivance, but it's nothing compared with the novel's real problem.

See, despite its preoccupation with grand themes (family, ageing, death), and its attempt to capture, through its hopelessly fractured narrative, the fluctuations and vicissitudes of existence as we really experience it, it's a shallow, artificial book. Dozens of characters flit through the text – they're named, nicely sized up (‘legs mapped with varicose veins’), given a snappy backstory; they display a quirk here, make an arch remark there (‘Kafka wrote slice-of-life fiction’) – but, ultimately, few of them manage to possess even a glimmer of life. [Kristian Doyle]