Customer Reviews

The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg

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Eisenberg is both a great and a limited writer. Her greatness is in her minute observation of moment-by-moment consciousness. When she gets into a character's mind, the reader shares every twist and turn as if it were his own. What I find most remarkable is that her characters frequently express states of consciousness I myself know but have never been able to articulate, or never knew I wanted to articulate because they are semi-conscious parts of my movements through everyday life, things I thought neither I nor anyone else could care about. Eisenberg makes you care because she shows even the most desultory states as luminous moments of human existence. No other writer makes boredom so interesting. There are a couple of passages in "Days," for example, that express those times I can't seem to get myself going even though I know I have to. Eisenberg does with with such precision I KNOW she's been hiding in my apartment, watching my every move and inhabiting my mental space. She does this over and over, though her main characters tend to be young, youngish or middle-aged women.

She's limited because she's not much on plot, if she can be said to have plots at all. This makes her writing go slack at times, almost as if she's marking time because she doesn't know where her narrative is heading. At her worst, she seems to stall with her characters, but after a few pages she gets them going again. Eisenberg is like Alice Munro in that she writes "long short stories" about characters who are similar. Munro is a better plotter, meaning she keeps her stories moving at a brisker pace. On the other hand, she doesn't quite have Eisenberg's Proustian vision into the personal worlds of her characters. Among contemporary writers, Eisenberg seems unique in this regard.

This collection brings together in one volume stories from four previous collections: Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986(, Under the 82nd Airborne (1992), All Around Atlantis (1997), and Twilight of the Superheroes (2006). Eisenberg has a distinguished pedigree: she is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant and has received other awards and fellowships, and is professor of creative writing at the University of Virginia. Her work has been praised by practically every major publication, from the New York Times to the San Francisco Chronicle to Harper's to the Times of London. Critics have described her stories "concentrated bursts of perfection (London Times) and possessing "all the steely beauty of a knife wrapped in velvet" (Boston Globe). She's not just good, she's very good.

This is my first exposure to her fiction but it won't be my last. As a writer of short fiction, she is the equal or superior of any writer of short fiction today, and I include my longtime favorites Alice Munro and William Trevor. At 980 pages of stories, this compendium is a chunk. The reader who attempts to conquer it through brute force will be doing him or herself a disfavor. Eisenberg's stories deserve time and space between readings so the full shock value isn't attenuated.

The sections are, respectively, the four separate collections previously published of her stories.

A passage in the first story in this volume, "Flotsam," captures a mood, or an insight, that runs throughout Eisenberg's work:

Everything seemed to change on that one day, but really, I think, things had been changing and changing over the course of many previous days, and perhaps what eventually appears to be information always appears at first to be just flotsam, meaningless fragments, until enough flotsam accretes to manifest, when one notices it, a construction.

She writes of disconnected people and troubled loves, above all of the loneliness and emptiness in these people's lives. Her protagonists suffer from a withdrawing from or atrophy of experience. They are drifting, seeking an anchor sometimes, or a jolt of experience at other times to reset their emotional clocks. An experience, sometimes the most mundane and inconsequential experience, shocks them into an awareness of how separated they are from feeling, the people around them, their own past histories or a consciousness of a meaningful future ahead of them. All of the stories in the first collection, Transactions, are first rate. It's hard to pick a best one but the last story in the collection, "Broken Glass," exemplifies them.

A young woman, exhausted and disconsolate after the drawn out illness and death of her mother, flees to Mexico to regain her bearings. She rents an upstairs flat in a villa owned by an expatriate American couple, who are older than her but of indeterminate age. Against her wishes, they draw her into their routine of daily meals and nightly party giving: she sees that it is their way of keeping at bay the Demons in their utterly trivial and purposeless lives. After an especially excruciating evening spent with utterly boring people, mostly expats, the mistress of the house confronts her, and engages her in this banal but revealing discourse:

She took both my hands as I stood up to go, and she looked in my face searchingly. "The main thing is, Are You Having Fun?"

"Yes," I said. "Of course."

"Good." She released me and shook her head slowly. "Because that's the main thing."

If anything would turn one off a life of hedonism living abroad as an expatriate, this story should.

The vision of these poor people's lives that Eisenberg spreads before us is scarifying, discommoding, hard to stand up to, but it is intensely real and heartfelt. This superior fiction deserves a wide readership.

There is a devastating story in the second collection (Under the 82nd Airborne) entitled "The Robbery." Most of the story is the description of a dinner party -or is it drinking party? The young beautiful, or at least successful, people talk and drink and eat and talk some more. Longing looks are exchanged across the lines of partners. The talk grows more vivid, more looks, hurt feelings, and by then you know that something is broken in these people -something is wrong- and it will never be fixed. It is done so gradually and obliquely that it is difficult to tell what has happened that is wrong or when you first notice the malaise of living that has settled across all of the members of this seemingly happy, prospering group of young marrieds. Half way through the story, the hostess feels ill -she is in the early stages of her second pregnancy. She feels, she thinks, "like an apple with a hidden soft spot spreading under the skin." That is phenomenal writing and Eisenberg does it over and over in this phenomenal collection.

One hardly knows how to describe a Deborah Eisenberg story, let alone this volume which brings together all five of her collections under a single cover. Adjectives like "exhilarating" or "dazzling" feel too light, too insubstantial to give the sense of the power and precision of her work. Others like "genius" have been so over used as to become common as crab grass and as such would feel like an insult to a writer who can fairly and without hyperbole be described as perhaps the best currently active American short story writer.

Eisenberg's stories aren't the minimalist sort that has gained so much traction in recent decades - her prose are weighty, the word bulky comes to mind. Many feel as if they might well be novels, yet the don't have the stripped down feel of other such stories - one doesn't get the sense of characters imprisoned by an author's commitment to the form, as if the shortness of the length were walls which they can't claw through to get to their real potential. No, Eisenberg's characters breathe in the moment.

Her stories, usually on the longish side at thirty plus pages, would rather meander a bit, often down tangents letting the reader gain an attachment to the character in a way that other practitioners of this form tend to eschew. As such they deliver a feeling of a being on a journey, the emotional baggage and humor giving them a heft which rests not on a single word or moment, no it is the flow of her character's relationships that carry the reader along, pulling us in their interior lives. As such, each story can at times feel exhausting, an emotional investment, making this collection a thing to be sipped, not gobbled, almost 1,000 page of prose to be digested slowly over weeks and months not hours, less one be left totally spent.

Eisenberg is funny, often sardonic, and always poignant. The title story of her fifth collection, "Twilight of the Superheroes" brings forth beautifully both the sense of mourning and melodrama that permeated New York in the wake of 9/11. Another, the "Girl Who Left her Sock on the Floor" holds much of the same sense of loss. As with many in her collected works, these stories permeate with questions of the end of childhood and what it means to be an adult.

"The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg" deserves a place in your home. Not on a shelf gathering dust, but on your nightstand, so that you may indulge yourself, one story at a time, to treasure every visit into the world of her singular talent.

At 970 pages, a thick book, though it didn't seem that long actually. And how childish to assess a book based on the number of pages. It was thought-provoking and there were many flashes of brilliant writing. I don't know anyone personally who's a prodigious enough reader to whom I would recommend such a collection.
The protagonists, all women, mostly seemed to twist in the wind somehow, and were a little hard to pin down. While gifted observers, some of them seemed incomplete, even by contrast with the peripheral characters, and sucked energy into themselves from those around them.
Several stories had the theme of the haves versus the have-nots, some of them set in South America, where the US was exploiting the indigenous populations. Sometimes there would be one character crying Foul about that and another character explaining how it was a shame but that it was simply the way of the world, -without huge corporations enslaving them, the natives would have no livelihood at all. A case was sometimes made for a simpler, more primitive way of life, but it also seemed clear that the time for that has long passed and the world has changed too much to ever go back.
Some of the characters were extremely intelligent but a lesson seemed to be that if you're too smart (or critical?), and decline to fit in, no-one will love you, except perhaps in the abstract, from afar.

This magnificent and thorough collection is a real treasure. I can think of no contemporary story writer who has such fun with language, who can cleave into the tense emotions of people we know or think we know, who knows how and when to make us laugh and when to cry. This thick tome holds all of Eisenberg's stories thus far and the most remarkable thing is that she has remained remarkably consistent through her career. The carefulness of her prose, the precision-driven sentences, empathetic plots, strong and resolute characters--these qualities make us keep reading.

One of my favorite stories in the collection is a later one, "Revenge of the Dinosaurs." In it, a young woman flies back to New York to sort out her dying grandmother's apartment. In the process of fielding the searing emotional demands of two important men in her life--her brother and her boyfriend--she focuses on the intensity of considering her Nana's life and what it meant. In the process, Eisenberg zeroes in on some of the most radically "real" moments all of us must and do face by virtue of being alive. She plumbs the ways in which the subconscious can influence what seem to be deliberate decisions. Consider the following passage from "Revenge":

"There weren't going to be many artifacts. There wasn't going to be much for the world to remember our shiny Nana by except for example her small hard rectangular book on currency. It's incredible. I can't quite ever really wrap my head around it, that each life is amazingly abundant. No matter what. And every moment of experience is so intense, but so little evidence of that exists outside the living body. Billions of intense, abundant human lives on this earth, Nana's among them, vanishing, leaving nothing more than inscrutable little piles of commemorative trash."

This is poetry, poetry to commit to memory. I love Deborah Eisenberg's beautiful stories and think you will too.

I have great admiration for the author's prose, but have to admit to some frustration and disappointment with this collection. In a number of the stories the characters' relationships aren't clear early on and this was distracting. For example, one story is about a little girl's trip to NYC with a friend, and her friend's sisters and the friend's father. The story opens with the kids getting in the car to go to the airport and I re-read it several times, then just moved on until it was clear that the primary character wasn't with her siblings.

As to content, several of the short stories had female characters who just followed men around and were incredibly passive. Some of them ended up leaving the men for various reasons, but after a while I got rather annoyed reading about young women who just drift passively along letting men dictate their lives. I would have liked to have read less of that type of story. Please don't misunderstand - I'm not saying that it's wrong to write a story like this, only that there are so many of them in this collection that it aggravated me.

In any case, Eisenberg is an excellent writer and I'll watch for her stories in The New Yorker as I am a subscriber.

Eisenberg resembles writers I read in grad school, and wrote abstruse papers claiming they portray sublime humane truths, when what I meant was: Why don't they resolve? Why must every story end ambiguously, sometimes in mid-action? Don't misunderstand me, I love a good "Lady or the Tiger" ending, but when a collection of over thirty stories includes few proper conclusions, I wonder if the author is ambiguous or just lazy.

In each story, a viewpoint character, always female, often first-person, finds herself thrust into a morally complex or ambivalent situation. Our POV isn't a heroine, more often just a reporter, but she provides an insightful outsider's perspective on the minor dramas and subtle betrayals that make up modern American life. Stories unfold slowly (many stories approach short novel length) and are rife with telling detail that makes situations more human.

Then the stories end. With some notable exceptions, they don't conclude or resolve, they just end, stop, that's all folks, period. Often they end just point where, with other writers, we would expect some moment of perception, reflection, or at least an opportunity to burn bridges and walk away. Instead Eisenberg just lets the air out of the tires, leaving us nowhere to go and no way to get there.

The frustrating part is, before those irresolute endings, I really, really like Eisenberg's stories. She creates sophisticated characters in volatile situations, with an angle of view that requires us as readers to take an active hand in the experience. Her best stories, which are often not her longest, invite us into the complexities of a world that resembles our own, but with strange stakes and indefinable players in bizarre games.

Perhaps Eisenberg sees her ambiguous endings as extensions of her complex stories. Maybe she expects us to write our own conclusions. Maybe she sees her stories as moral exercises in which we must make our own decisions rather than relying on her. But when this happens so often, with very good stories just stopping before the arc is complete, I feel confused, lost in a strange city with no map.

Disclaimer: I am reviewing an advance unproofread copy that I received for free from the Vine program.

No spoilers here, so I can't get into anything too specific, plot-wise. What an amazing collection of stories, so long and deep and intense and meaty, something to really dig into, take your time, definitely not something you're going to read through and forget soon afterwards. This is serious stuff (though also very funny).

And by the way, definitely disregard the other reviewer who said to skip the first few stories -- they are amazing too!

I'm a guy and I read a lot of science fiction, and a lot (especially older sci-fi; less true of more recent stuff) is written by guys, from a male perspective, which gets boring for me. So I really appreciate stories told from a realistic internal female perspective, and this book is very much in that vein; I mean this as a definite compliment in a very good way!

Contemporary literature is not usually my thing. So many books today are shallow and predictable. But I was very surprised to find that this collection of short stories is insightful and fresh. What an excellent writer. Her prose and style help each story ring true. Highly recommended if you're looking for some insightful short fiction to read while kicking back on a rainy day or with good cup of coffee. Kudos!

Skip the first set of stories, which are early efforts and tend to blend all together. But once you get to the second set, you realize almost instantly that Deborah Eisenberg is a special talent. The dialogue is fantastic. The word choice is spot on and the rhythm of the sentences is like good music. I can't say that I like the subject matter very much - Eisenberg is almost exclusively concerned with the lives of rather feckless women tenuously tied to rather creepy men - but I do love the writing. There is humor and pathos throughout, often in the space of one sentence. You can pick up any story in the final three quarters of this collection and find something that would make any writer or careful reader smile.