A friendship triangle

"BY nature," Lore Segal told an interviewer in 1985, "I am infinitely slow." At the time, she was accounting for the two decades (give or take a year) it took her to write "Her First American." Well, another two decades have passed. And Ilka Weissnix, the Viennese refugee whose prolonged and painful transplantation to the New World was the subject of that earlier novel, has returned.

By the time we encounter her in "Shakespeare's Kitchen" -- a collection of stories so effectively soldered together that we may as well call it a novel -- Ilka has exiled herself once again, this time to suburban Connecticut. This is something of a puzzle. Having gotten a toehold in New York City ("naturalized," as the Viennese-born Segal once wrote of herself, "not in North America so much as in Manhattan"), why would she ever leave?

The answer: a job. Ilka has been offered an administrative gig at the Concordance Institute, a pint-size think tank on a college campus. After some hesitation, she accepts. There is something perverse about her willed plunge back into estrangement. Yet the art or necessity of living alone, in a kind of self-propelled solitude, has always been one of the author's great themes. So Ilka hangs her hat in a temporary home, vacated by an assistant professor on sabbatical. In describing it, Segal echoes the title of her first book, "Other People's Houses."

"The stillness in the air suggested recent agitation, palpable absences like the absence of newly dead people," we read. "Ilka carried bags up the stairs, opened a door and stood smelling the alien temperature of other people's bedrooms. She looked inside their closet. They were young people, strapped for money, collectors of checkered flannel bargain shirts in sharp, sad colors."

Like many newcomers, she is at first rebuffed. With a little persistence, she meets the Bernstines, the Stones, the Cohns: faculty couples with dogs, children, tenure. She meets Winterneet, an elusive Nobel laureate, and swiftly deflects his advances at a party. Her great prize, however, is the affection of a gilded couple, Leslie and Eliza Shakespeare. Leslie is the director of the institute, an Oxford academic with an exquisite manner and "eyes so blue Ilka could look through them to the sky behind his back." His wife, a big, acid-tongued Canadian, welcomes her into the inner sanctum: the kitchen. Within a few weeks, the trio becomes what Leslie calls "elective cousins."