Deborah Eisenberg speaks in the voice of a despairing god: wry, cool, resonant, capable of three dimensions of irony at once, besotted with the beauty and tragedy of this darkening planet of ours ... Every story in the new collection...holds at least one image that can knock you to your knees ...Beauty that spreads through the mind and lingers there in alterations so deep they’re almost physical: This is what I love most about Eisenberg’s work ... Eisenberg is a gorgeous writer of lines and dialogue and paragraphs, all the artistry in the marks upon the page, but even more deeply — and much more interestingly — she is an artist of the unsaid ... Stare hard, Eisenberg tells us, and watch the banal world transform into marvels ... I thank my stars that there’s a writer in the increasingly imperiled world as smart and funny and blazingly moral and devastatingly sidelong as she is.
[Eisenberg] is always worth the wait. The new book is cannily constructed, and so instantly absorbing that it feels like an abduction ... On the face of it, Your Duck Is My Duck could be regarded as a politically mild book for Eisenberg. The world intrudes only at the margins — tumult is hinted at in unnamed countries, glimpses of unspecified migrants. But these are stories of painful awakenings and refusals of innocence. This book offers no palliatives to its characters or to its readers — no plan of action. But it is a compass.
Like much of Eisenberg’s previous work, the stories in Your Duck Is My Duck are concerned with inequality, disaster and the sense that we’re pretty deep into the end times, a position that’s rarely out of fashion, but that feels particularly apposite now ... Eisenberg is as alive to the potentialities of language as any contemporary writer I know. This is what makes her work so funny and exciting, and is also what provides its philosophical heft. She is fascinated by its limitations: her stories are full of incomplete sentences, misunderstandings and double meanings. In Merge, the collection’s longest piece, the insufficiencies of language are probed to a troubling extent ... the longer story’s power proves that Eisenberg doesn’t need dystopias: she’s perfectly capable of summoning apocalyptic atmospheres by focusing her extraordinary talents on the world right outside the window.
Dense, disorienting, disturbing, and sometimes prayer-like, Eisenberg’s stories run roughshod through received ideas of the rules for a 'well-made short story.' They are filled with nonsequential scenes, enormous time leaps, slippery perspective, capacious unresolved plots and subplots—no limits. Yet like Calvino’s crystal, they are exquisitely formed. Words refract, themes reflect, illuminations and epiphanies bounce furiously ... Stories don’t in principle have the space to unfurl lifetimes, multiple settings, formation and reverberation. Yet Eisenberg’s stories— with their telescoping time lines and surprising associative turns—expand, even in their ellipses ... There is so much living and expression these characters (small and large) bring to the page ... Eisenberg’s rich linguistic spectrum is on full display in this story, from the virtuosic description of the train ride to the brainwashing clinic, through to the total dulling. It is a reminder of how masterfully she moves between registers: heightened description, emotional flurries, and crisp, cutting clarity.
The disjuncture between American reality – particularly the Manhattan dinner party circuit of careerists and bohemians – and the atrocities America commits abroad has featured in Eisenberg’s short stories since her second collection ... Eisenberg isn’t a rapid response fiction writer, and the political threads in the six stories in her new collection, Your Duck Is My Duck, reflect her perennial concerns rather than indignations specific to the Trump era, though the president does furnish an epigraph to the book’s longest and trickiest story, ‘Merge’ ... For all its pessimism about human nature, the story is whimsical and its three character portraits affectionate to a fault ... Another story, ‘The Third Tower’, approaches the concept of language in a more bluntly allegorical way ... There are a few good jokes...but the story is slight. The confined clinical setting, meant to deprive Therese of sensory stimulation, drains Eisenberg’s fiction of its usual observational precision ... The most satisfying piece in Your Duck Is My Duck is the title story.
Eisenberg’s latest...has become my other favorite collection published in 2018. She’s smart, funny, artful ... full of whimsy and irony ... Eisenberg’s stories...[skate] on the edge of the supernatural without ever crossing the border. People’s mental states might make them see uncanny things, but the overarching narrator has perfect vision.
One of Eisenberg’s great innovations is in the real-time depiction of thought on the page, the banal revelations and asides that sustain us through otherwise intolerable days ... One marvels at the tonal tightrope Eisenberg walks, the adoption of the mock highfalutin internal monologue allowing for multiple levels of riffing ... There is, too, a sense of polyphony across the entirety of the collection. Though Eisenberg has said that she doesn’t write individual stories with the idea of their relationship to the others in mind, each of her collections has a cohesiveness that derives in part from her preoccupations, which echo across the pieces ... [Eisenberg] has few peers among contemporary story writers, and like those to whom she might be usefully compared (Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore, the late Mavis Gallant), her work has continued to expand and mutate over the course of her career... [her techniques] have only grown more sophisticated over time, resulting in stories that feel both architectural and organic ... One gets the sense, when deep inside an Eisenberg story, that she is pushing past her own understanding of what she knows, trying to find and identify the most difficult questions possible.
It’s a challenge to find your bearings, but her stories’ rewards accumulate faster than frequent-flier miles ... Although somewhat less fractured and abstract than her earlier work, the six acerbically witty tales in Eisenberg’s new book are still hard to summarize, because they’re neither simple nor linear. Most branch off in surprising directions, sprouting sub-plots, flashbacks and fast-forwards, spreading out with the fecundity of wild berry bushes. They encompass many of her recurrent preoccupations, including life’s uncontrollable randomness, the fundamental unknowability of others, the near-ubiquitousness of familial and romantic estrangement, and the recognition that the past is never really 'over and done with' ... All these stories bear the stamp of Eisenberg’s dramatist’s ear and mordant wit ... Eisenberg...merges multiple ideas to capture complexities—in every story in this remarkable collection.
There’s something of Norman Rush in Eisenberg’s manically intelligent narrators, something of Joan Silber in her elaborate structures, something of George Saunders or Margaret Atwood in her dystopian visions. But the experience of reading Eisenberg is radically alien ... in Your Duck Is My Duck, Eisenberg seems to have in her sights a more general—and extremely pessimistic—assessment of American life ... It’s not just in the specifics—the effects of climate change, the decrepitude of the New York City subway—but in the sense of malaise, both emotional and political, that despite flashes of humor (Eisenberg can be a very funny writer) hangs over this collection ... What is most startling is not her assessment of American decline but the realization that it has been going on for so long. Entering Eisenberg’s fiction is like diving off a cliff into a freezing lake: you are plunged into a world of confusion, with no one to help you get your bearings and no recourse but to struggle your way to the surface. Her openings are trapdoors, pushing the concept of in medias res as far as it can go ... Eisenberg’s process is one of radical immersion: We’re plunked down with a group of characters and, for a moment, given full access to their thoughts and feelings. Then we’re off to plunge into a new scenario, knowing nothing ... 'It’s not my duck, it’s not my bottle, it’s not my problem.' In a book in which titles tend to the inscrutable, this one feels like a shot in the arm ... Your problem is my problem—your duck is my duck. The things we do elsewhere will come home to haunt us. Perhaps they always have.
[Eisenberg's] seventh book, Your Duck Is My Duck, showcases her inimitable voice and captures our current national mood with eerie precision ... You never quite know where Eisenberg is going, or how she’s going to get there. The destination is less the pleasure than the dead-on observations along the way... Practically every line in this superb collection is that accurate, disarming and quotable.
As heartbreaking as these works may be, the beauty of the language and Eisenberg’s sympathy for her characters will win over readers ... Eisenberg’s ability to dramatize family strife through small details has never been more acute, as when an aunt’s purchase of a baby doll for her niece intensifies the mother’s jealousy. And Eisenberg’s writing is glorious throughout, such as her description of a woman wearing 'a little vintage sundress, the color of excellent butter.' A story about a teenage woman seeking a cure for episodes of confusion feels unfocused, but the other five are among the most astute works of short fiction this year. You may not like all the characters, but the book doesn’t disappoint.
And true to form, the writing bears the traits of the stereotypical New York short story: urbane, quippy, elliptical and ironic, lacquered in atmospheric detail and heavy on existential dread... The stories at times seem like mere storage containers for Ms. Eisenberg’s vinegary aphorisms ... Wealth, politics, age difference, technology, pharmaceuticals—all conspire to strand these characters on islands of self-centered incomprehension.
A story keeps you uneasy and off-kilter, and maybe no short story writer (other than Mavis Gallant) keeps you more on your toes than Deborah Eisenberg ... What is perhaps most intensified this go-around is her concern with the possibilities and limitations of language itself ... The ingrained absoluteness of privilege is one of her greatest, bleakest themes ... 'Your Duck is My Duck' is, among other things, a stunning auto-critique—a laying-bare of the inefficacy and impotence of the kind of politically-engaged art of which the story itself is an example ... One of the miracles of a Deborah Eisenberg story is the unusually acute sense that the story is being incarnated as you’re reading it, a remarkable present-tense quality that comes from how synced up she is with her characters’ consciousness.
... filled with prose so intense it manages to paint a comprehensive picture of our times in six short stories. There are personal histories and universal themes here, but also urgent subjects such as migration and climate change, corporate greed and the dangers of the internet, all outlined in the subtlest of tones yet vividly recognizable, even – or not least – when told as parables ... Eisenberg impresses on many levels, especially when portraying her characters by proxy.
Like much of Eisenberg’s work, the six stories in Your Duck Is My Duck take place in a landscape where communication is difficult and connection, even language, can be vague and imprecise. At the same time, her writing burns with urgency ... Were Eisenberg less precise about her imprecision, the whole illusion could fall apart. But the beauty—and yes, the power—of her fiction is how she evokes the general state of decay and dislocation in the most specific terms.
Deborah Eisenberg's marvelously unnerving collection Your Duck Is My Duck twists and untwists themes of family, class and language in six distinct, wholly entertaining stories ... While Eisenberg can be caustic at times—her humor dark—these stories alight on something tender: the weird way people try to remember and love each other ... Eisenberg pulls off her uncanny narrative structures with panache. Rarely have short stories felt so full. Your Duck Is My Duck is both quirky and profound, brimming with the dangers and wonders of life.
Master writer Deborah Eisenberg just may have given us the perfect fiction collection for these parlous times ... Your Duck Is My Duck’ is Ms. Eisenberg’s first new collection of short stories in 12 years, and it was worth the wait. Every story displays the off-kilter perspectives, rollicking sentences and barbed wit that made her a MacArthur fellow and a PEN/Faulkner Award winner ... Ms. Eisenberg usually takes her sweet old time to get to the punchline, but the journey is always worthwhile.
The book, her first new collection in 12 years, comprises six engrossing stories that impart so much, it is hard to believe you have spent just 20 or 30 pages with the characters ... These stories are more bleak than upbeat, but... [are] related with great warmth and beauty.
... retrospection, tinged with rueful wisdom and more than a little melancholy, is central to the collection ... That said, even after repeat readings I’m not sure how all of the story’s thematic elements, which grow to include mental illness and theories of language, cohere into a persuasive whole. At the same time, it’s evident that a late Eisenberg story isn’t interested in surrendering its meanings too easily ... Her writing adds to our collective store of wit, empathy, and intelligence. If you haven’t read her yet, by all means start with Your Duck Is My Duck...
In these tales every character is memorable, every situation seizes our attention and not a single word is out of place ... ironic self-awareness buoys the collection, keeping its flailing inhabitants within reach of the reader’s sympathy. Even though Eisenberg is a very funny writer, her stories offer few gags, their humor more likely to rise from the oddness of her characters. Potentially jokey lines are delivered in all seriousness ... We’re hurtling through time. The moments catch fire and burn out. It’s my fervent hope, nevertheless, that someday we’ll have the opportunity to look back on the many more stories that Deborah Eisenberg has yet to write.
I would argue that some of these pieces are more like novellas, or mini-novels. Indeed, it may be that Eisenberg and Alice Munro have expanded the idea of what a short story is ... Eisenberg is an interesting writer, 'a great noticer,' and extremely articulate with an exemplary vocabulary and style. These stories pull you in and imitate life in an uncanny way ... What is so remarkable about the narrative is how alive these people are ... a more straightforward piece of writing and reveals Eisenberg’s concerns about the apparently deteriorating world we live in. It is, in a way, her call to arms, that the repulsive people she is writing about cannot have the last word ... I also appreciated her ambition, her need to address all these ills of inequity, colonialism, the despoliation of the environment, and the motives of selfishness and neglect with which the rich often lead their privileged lives ... there were times when I was acutely uncomfortable, and I found myself wishing for more from this very talented writer.
The wry, singular stories of the US short-story writer Deborah Eisenberg aren’t easy to pin down. Temporally fluid, chatty without being workaday, they don’t rely on plot yet aren’t person-has-thoughts narratives either and are often built from a dizzying array of moving parts. If there’s a secret, she isn’t giving it away ... Eisenberg trusts us to stay afloat ... Ruminative passages soften us up for the darkly comic shock of sharp exchanges ... Eisenberg isn’t tough going – far from it – but she defies neat summary, perhaps in part because, by her own admission, she conceives of individual stories, not collections, leaving those to editors. Now in her 70s, she’s prized across the Atlantic, but isn’t as well known in Britain, where she hasn’t had a regular publisher; here’s hoping that changes with this scintillating showcase of her one-off talent.
...six superlative and entertaining stories ... Eisenberg is funny, grim, biting, and wise, but always with a light touch and always in the service of worlds that extend far beyond the page. A virtuoso at rendering the flickering gestures by which people simultaneously hide and reveal themselves, Eisenberg is an undisputed master of the short story.
It’s not hard to understand why. Eisenberg’s métier is reticence: Her characters move through a world they find bewildering, with no easy strategy to reach out and connect ... The stories here are long, most more than 30 pages, and they take their time in getting to the point. But that’s OK; in fact, it’s the whole pleasure of reading her, the assurance that there is no quick fix, no easy resolution, that things are as muddy, as complicated on the page as they are in the world. What is never muddy, though, is her writing, which is sharp and pointed and direct ... These brilliant stories invoke the desire for something other than what you've been given, which applies to us as much as to Eisenberg's characters, whose distracted desperation can’t help, in the end, but reflect our own.
