What distinguishes Eisenberg from peers like Grace Paley, Joy Williams and William Trevor is an approach to storytelling that can be dizzyingly prismatic, as if refracted through cracked glass. Eisenberg has little faith in the typical expository armatures that prop up dramatic scenes: who is talking and to whom and about what, even though close reading will answer these questions in time. By stripping away quotation marks and the informational fat that might provide obvious explanations, by thrusting readers into the middle of a conversation with characters we have yet to meet properly or playing hot potato with point of view, Eisenberg tests just how much can be left out before a story drowns in enigma … Eisenberg has given us these remarkable stories, machines of perfect revelation deftly constructed by a contemporary master.
These characters are all misfits of one sort or another. They are people who experience themselves as outsiders who never quite fit into the roles they have been assigned in life; people, poorly equipped by temperament or emotional history for the Darwinian struggle of life … Using her playwright's ear for dialogue and a journalistic eye for the askew detail, Ms. Eisenberg gives us — in just a handful of pages — a visceral sense of these characters' daily routines, the worlds they inhabit and the families they rebel against or allow to define them. By moving fluently back and forth between the present and the past, she shows how memories and long ago events shadow current decisions, how the gap between expectations and reality grows ever wider as the years scroll by.
Sanity — the thin line between having it and losing it — is a recurrent theme. Many of these characters fall somewhere between neurotic and downright dysfunctional … In life, we sink under the weight of our own limited brains. But as readers — at least of fiction as wry and crisp as Eisenberg's — we can escape.
While it's the title of the collection, ‘Twilight of the Superheroes’ isn't actually the best story in Eisenberg's new collection. That distinction goes to ‘Some Other, Better Otto,’ in which a 60-something lawyer contemplates his complicated family relations and worries about his mentally unstable sister and the nature of the self … In just a handful of tales Eisenberg offers enough insight and intelligent observation to amply justify her reputation as the American Alice Munro.
Its half-dozen long stories put her light-years ahead of most story writers in terms of capturing the feeling tones of the world around us and the people in it … Though Eisenberg's sense of character is sharp and distinctive, as in the bereaved Uncle Lucien of the title story, or, with his musical talents and his tranquil sense of composure, the longtime companion William of the second, or the pathetic but compelling Kristina of the beautifully imagined ‘Window,’ a story of post-hippie life in a Virginia backwoods cabin, Eisenberg's sense of language and how to sound it makes those emotive states possible.
Twilight of the Superheroes contains six stories, each of them tinged with sorrow and want and the missed trains of life. They range in plot from a group of young New Yorkers blinded by the events of 9/11 to a seemingly ditzy woman escaping the gilded misery of her marriage; family — the people we choose or have to deal with — is the connective grout here, whether cracked or holding … The agility of Eisenberg's compassion is what provides her work with its emotional heft.
Twilight of the Superheroes consists of six stories about complicated, and far from nuclear, family life … Eisenberg has long been interested in considering the political contexts and resonances of personal lives. But, like many writers who have (perhaps prematurely) tried to 'deal with' 9/11, she ends up resorting to cliches about the return of normality, the end of empire and the glory of the Manhattan skyline. At their best, Eisenberg's stories reveal the abstract absurdity as well as the pain of human relationships.
You might talk all day about Deborah Eisenberg's title which, in the end, eerily comes to signify every story in her wonderful book. Throughout, she concerns herself with the ‘superpowers’ of youth (and perhaps the waning ones of the no-longer-young American republic); lamentably, the power to shirk responsibility, politics, life itself. Stylistically the title story is the boldest of these six various tragedies — for that is what they are — written with a ruthless, compassionate eye and a subtle humour … Fear is a component of these stories - fear of what may interrupt your own history, fear of something gone wrong with the world (or rather, the real world asserting itself or being suddenly revealed), or of something that might go wrong with you.
Short-story master Eisenberg delivers, with signature intelligence and humor, six elegant, soulful new tales … The author is at the top of her form delving into the varied but devastating truth that, even after an apocalypse, people still have to lie in the beds they've made, unable to sleep. A terrific addition to the oeuvre of one of America's finest and most deeply empathetic short story writers.
