SHORT STORIES REVIEW: The Collected Stories of Deborah EisenbergBy Deborah Eisenberg Picador, 980pp, $22.00
WHAT IS IT like to be a genius? Ask Deborah Eisenberg. The question is not as hyperbolic as it might seem; last year, Eisenberg was awarded a MacArthur fellowship, usually referred to as a “Genius Grant”. If that award served to spotlight Eisenberg’s achievement as one of America’s foremost writers of fiction, this new volume of collected stories confirms it, illustrating that over the past 25 years Eisenberg has become better and better at the things at which, 25 years ago, she was already something of a master.
In an Eisenberg story, the characters are intoxicating in their frenetic, flawed humanity, the language – at once rich and crystalline, at once blunt and evocative – is irresistible, and the scenes have a vivid intimacy that reaches the reader as a deliciously conflicted pleasure. We are eavesdropping, too, on these lives and these minds, we worry, yet we can only keep our ears pricked for more.
This volume brings together Eisenberg's four previously published story collections: Transactions in a Foreign Currency(1986), Under the 82nd Airborne(1992), All Around Atlantis(1997) and Twilight of the Superheroes(2006).
Apart from its humour, which is strident and knife-sharp, two aspects of Eisenberg's fiction are evident from her earliest stories. Firstly, her women are not heroes. They are not paragons of strength and independence. They flounder and they falter; they find themselves paralysed by doubt and passivity, they love men who barely notice them. "Don't get shabby, please," a man chides his girlfriend in A Lesson in Travelling Light; don't ask questions, he means. But the men pick their way just as ineptly through the tangle of choice and responsibility that is human life and when crises strike, both sexes are equally trapped in the headlights.
In A Cautionary Tale, Patty is struck by sympathy for the pathetic vista of her troublesome housemate asleep, "in a little humid wad" which seems to sum up his essential infancy: "How painful it was to be reminded that Stuart's helplessness was something beyond a manipulative ruse!"
The second striking aspect of Eisenberg's fiction points, in fact, to the human truth which underlies this general helplessness. For Eisenberg's is a fiction, ultimately, of consciousness – of the burden, rather, of consciousness. Her stories lay bare the structures and the trajectories of how we think, how we behave, how we act within the world, performing on the most apparently mundane material of existence an eidetic reduction so surgical that it hurts to read. It hurts when your eyes are opened, as happens to the teenage narrator of What It Was Like, Seeing Chris, obsessed with an older man she has spotted close to her optometrist's office: "It seemed amazing to me sometimes when I was talking to Chris that a person could just walk up to another person and say 'you'." The narrator in Transactions in a Foreign Currency, meanwhile, is speechified by her boyfriend into a panic that, in the eyes of the universe, the difference between one person and another is merely arbitrary. It takes a friendly butcher to bring her back to earth when she blurts out her fears: "'Well' – his eyes narrowed thoughtfully – 'I'm standing over here, I see you standing over there, like that'." And then he packs up her sausages for supper.
The very skin of language is peeled away; the orientation of the self is rattled. But if there’s comedy and fascination in this broad existential impulse, it’s when Eisenberg knuckles down to human subjectivity at a macro level that her powers of insight and of evocation are revealed most powerfully. Never mind what it’s like to be a genius, Eisenberg could probably tell Thomas Nagel what it’s like to be a bat. Her eye misses nothing – least of all the bats clattering around in her characters’ particular belfries. Her narratives are populated by endless tiny moments of insight, of observation, of realisation and reaction. Through their veins, free indirect speech flows like an electrifying narcotic.
And yet, for all this hectic energy, Eisenberg’s fiction leans easily into wells of immense compassion.
In The Girl Who Left Her Sock on the Floor, from her third collection, another teenage narrator is trying to come to terms with the fact that her mother has just died. "If you were to break, for example, your hip, there would be the pain, the proof, telling you all the time it was true: that's then and this is now. But this thing – each second it had to be true all over again; she was getting hurled against each second. Now. And now again – thwack!Maybe one of these seconds she'd smash right through and find herself in the clear place where her mother was alive, scowling, criticising . . ."
That's the hunt for all of Eisenberg's characters – to break through to that "clear place", that sense of steadiness and sureness in the self and in the world. Here's how Otto, the hilarious elderly narrator of Some Other, Better Otto(another quinessentially anxious Eisenberg title), thinks back on his occasional sexual transgressions: "A lot of commotion just for a glimpse into his own life, the real life, a life more vivid, more truly his, than the one that was daily at hand."
But consciousness makes it impossible to hold a moment clear and constant in the mind; Eisenberg's characters are as fragmented as the cities and countries in which they find themselves, from 1970s Honduras to New York in the last months of 2001 (Eisenberg's most recent collection, Twilight of the Superheroes, is a masterful study in mid-noughties uncertainty and guilt). Often, her characters suffer from what André Aciman has termed "arbitrage" – the tendency to imagine oneself remembering an experience even as it is taking place. And always, they search for themselves amid the rubble that is the self. But there is no life other than the one daily at hand. And there is no life more complicated, more infuriating, more irreplaceable. Eisenberg, a master of the cowering heart and the racing mind, at least allows her characters to know that much. It's our privilege to listen in along the way.
Belinda McKeon is a regular contributor to The Irish Times. She is based in New York
