Review by New York Times Review
ANYONE who loves the short story, that perennially marginalized and disrespected form, should rejoice in the appearance of a writer's collected stories. It's simply good for the team. (Recent proclamations that the novel is over and done with take aim at the bigger target for a change. Welcome, novels, to the realm of the unquiet dead.) When the short-story writer in question is as innovative and idiosyncratic as Deborah Eisenberg, it's an opportunity for both celebration and appraisal, a chance to explore our expectations of narrative in contentious times. As if there were any other times worth writing about. This collection contains in their entirety the four books of stories Eisenberg has written over a 20-year span ("Transactions in a Foreign Currency," 1986; "Under the 82nd Airborne," 1992; "All Around Atlantis," 1997; and "Twilight of the Superheroes," 2006). The resulting book weighs in at just under a thousand pages: heavy lifting but not heavy reading. Although the stories explore different geographies and different lives, there is more consistency throughout than variety. Those who admire some portion of Eisenberg's writing will find the same pleasures in the whole: remarkable language, unconventional storytelling and her characters' well-rendered and profound unease at inhabiting an uneasy world. No one would presume to tell any of Eisenberg's people to have a nice day. They seldom achieve as much as a good mood. They are as acutely self-conscious as they are outwardly inarticulate. Other more assertive and outlandish personalities overwhelm them; the world's appalling circumstances rightly appall them. Eisenberg conveys their interiority in such a fine grain that one thinks of Virginia Woolf, if only Woolf's work were leavened with startling humor: "Shapiro felt as though he'd awakened to find himself squatting naked in a glade, blinking up at a chortling TV crew that had just filmed him gnawing a huge bone." This is from "Someone to Talk To," and the wonderful incongruity is that Shapiro, a pianist, has just concluded a dubious performance of a piece of contemporary music. Elsewhere we read of a character's "cash register face" or of a woman using "a loud and artificially genial tone as if she were speaking to an armed high school student." Such sharp and jittery observations - Eisenberg's eye for the droll, the startling, the defamiliarized - are everywhere. Here is Francie (from "The Girl Who Left Her Sock on the Floor"): "Francie snatched open a drawer and out flew the fact of her mother's slippery, pinkish heap of underwear." The other fact that Francie is attempting to process is her mother's unexpected and off-stage death, which has been so mishandled by everyone that Francie's dazed, uncertain grieving becomes as shamed and absurd as the contents of the underwear drawer. FOR all the dead-on language Eisenberg's narrators employ, conversations among her characters are often cast as babble, with words a kind of evil charm to ward off meaning. People talk at cross purposes or, as in "The Robbery," engage in marathon drunken quarrels. In "A Cautionary Tale," Stuart attempts to "whine and orate" his way into his roommate's bed: "Don't you see the beauty of it, Patty? It's sound in every way - politically, economically, aesthetically. You and I would be an entire ecology, generating and utilizing our own energies." Clearly, seduction isn't what it used to be. Eisenberg writes with real poignancy about young girls who lack any sort of compass in navigating the world. They witness adult misbehavior, like Kyla in "Mermaids," who is palmed off on a wealthier and far more troubled family than her own, and they gain a store of cautionary knowledge. Sometimes children function as the symptom of the family disease, like the little girl in "Some Other, Better Otto," who conducts all discourse with her relatives as if it were a radio interview, using her fist as a microphone. ("And now we'll have a word with Aunt Corinne") In the luminous "What It Was Like, Seeing Chris," a high school girl with vision problems learns to see, in all senses of the word, the shabby truth about the older man who has represented glamour and sexual adventure. If the earlier stories often portray characters attempting to identify their own natures and claim their own desires, some later ones expand to engage more public concerns. A number of the stories are set in other countries, most often in Central America, but foreignness is a chronic condition for Eisenberg's characters, isolated by their hyper-awareness no matter where they are. The Central American stories ("Under the 82nd Airborne," "Holy Week," "Across the Lake" and others) bring their protagonists face to face with sinister, semi-acknowledged manipulations by their own government, with crushing economic inequities and with violence. Alarming Americans with vague backgrounds recur from story to story, men who are certainly perpetrating evil in our names. Yet there seems to be no clear course of action one can take in response. Knowledge makes Eisenberg's characters complicit, but helpless. The last story in the collection, "The Flaw in the Design," shows the wages of sin for those who benefit from exploitation, a wealthy American family gone haywire, the guilt of its members poisoning them as certainly as if it were toxic groundwater. Eisenberg's stories don't always behave as we're accustomed to seeing stories behave. Occasionally the narrative fragments or takes long detours, gestures puzzle, endings resist closure. Not every story takes such liberties, but those that do sometimes deliver the goods and sometimes fail to do so. "Window" withholds a great deal of information at its beginning and only gradually spools backward to tell us how the young woman sitting in another woman's kitchen (who proves to be her half-sister) with a child (who is not her own child) has escaped (for the time being at least) abuse and real danger. The story is nearly gothic, shimmering with menace, and its ending, bringing the plot full circle, creates echoes of sadness: who can ever be trusted to protect a child in need? Francie, in "The Girl Who Left Her Sock on the Floor," imagining herself an orphan, learns of the existence of her father and sets off to find him, her mother's cremated remains in tow. The story ends just before she encounters him. In a way this choice makes sense, since going forward would require a whole new narrative arc, with new questions asked and answered. But it's also abrupt and disappointing, given the investment the reader has now made in Francie. If the world of the story is one in which anything can happen (death, an encounter with a mad stranger, an improbable blimp accident), is it enough to leave all possibilities open? What such stories lack is a narrative killer instinct, the coup de grâce that gives an ending a sense of finality and the story preceding it momentum. A number of long stories (and they are very long indeed) accumulate rather than build. "Rosie Gets a Soul" has a title that promises action, even transformation, but Rosie, recovering from drug addiction, is mired in rediscovering basic thought processes and assumptions, and her small self-assertion at the end hardly seems like an adequate payoff. "Like It or Not" switches perspectives mid-story, then back again, without either story line really illuminating the other. We have witnessed a situation, we may have enjoyed the story's journey, but we end up where, precisely? OR even where, vaguely. Readers disdain pat or manipulated endings, and warm-hearted finales would be particularly out of place in the fraught, ironic and uncertain climate of modern life portrayed here. Epiphanies of any emphatic sort would overwhelm. It may be that Eisenberg's characters, often paralyzed by their own sensibilities, are incapable of more than elegiac sadness or oblique increases in self-knowledge. Yet if our lives, real or fictional, now resist the easy imposition of meaning, it's not too much to insist that the events of these lives still have consequences, and that we want our literature to say so. But some stories can be told only by reinventing the form. "Twilight of the Superheroes," the title story from Eisenberg's most recent book, tells of a group of young people subletting a splendid New York apartment overlooking the World Trade Center. They enjoy their fortunate lives until that morning when "something flashed and something tore, and the cloudless sky ignited." Different characters enter and exit, and their different histories are invoked, but the heart of the story is the passionate voice, belonging to all of them and none of them, mourning that which was lost, decrying all that resulted: "Provocation and retribution, arms manufacture and statehood, oil and war, commerce and dogma, and the spinning planet seemed to be boiling them all together at the center of the earth into a poison syrup." The actual ground of the 9/11 attacks has yet to be reworked into its final, memorialized form, but Eisenberg has already told us what that day meant, in language that both wounds and heals, like a tuning fork set to a pitch of exquisite pain. Eisenberg has an eye for the droll, the startling, the defamiliarized. Jean Thompson's novel "Everybody's Here, Everybody's Gone" will be published next year.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 18, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
Eisenberg, like Alice Munro and Amy Hempl, is a short story specialist who infuses the concentrated form with emotional intricacy and depth, dark humor, suspense, and wonder. Fluent in the dreams, pretensions, and demands of New York City, Eisenberg writes with equal finesse about those who have succeeded in securing a place in the social order and floundering twentysomethings botching love and other opportunities. Eisenberg also knows how a small apartment can become a wilderness and how dangerous the isolation of a rural life can be. Her characters, especially betrayed women, curl themselves around their psychic wounds like hands cupped around a candle's flame as the world churns on, assured, impatient, devouring. A MacArthur fellowship is Eisenberg's most recent major award, and now readers are granted a boon: this glorious volume contains in their entirety Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986), Under the 82nd Airborne (1992), All around Atlantis (1997), and Eisenberg's most commanding collection, Twilight of the Superheroes (2006). An electrifying gathering of masterful tales of treachery and resilience, souls lost and found.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Readers who have enjoyed Eisenberg's four volumes of short stories or grown familiar with her work in The New Yorker over the past 20 years will be thrilled with this substantial collection, which demonstrates the full range of her talents. These satisfyingly lengthy stories also have the potential to engross readers who avoid the genre, having been left hanging one too many times with lazy, enigmatic endings. Eisenberg is equally at home with artsy Manhattan social comedy (see "Flotsam," from Transactions in a Foreign Currency and "Some Other, Better Otto," from Twilight of the Superheroes), Jamesian narratives that characterize complex relationships in gracefully balanced long sentences (see "A Cautionary Tale," from Under the 82nd Airborne), politically savvy stories that capture differences of race and class through the perspective of American transplants in countries like Honduras (see "Broken Glass," Transactions, and "Someone To Talk To," from All Around Atlantis), and clear-eyed stories that nevertheless reveal the disjointed perceptions of characters with tragically damaged psyches (see "Window," Twilight). Verdict This impressive volume celebrates the prodigious talent of a writer who deserves to be better known.-Sue Russell, Bryn Mawr, PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
