Short Stories: Terror, chaos, regret, dread - such are the apocalyptic elements that drive these terrifying stories. They are also stories of, and for, our appalling times. Eisenberg is a chronicler with a vision shaped by the energy of her territory, a New York under siege, although she does venture elsewhere.
She surveys her society with a fatalist's exactness. She knows what has happened and, more importantly, what probably will happen. Characters age, then they die.
She has been compared with the Canadian master, Alice Munro, with whom she shares a preference for the longer short story. Both evoke lives, yet whereas Munro is reflective and meditative, Eisenberg is the more obviously tough and emphatic - and practises what is best described as a slow urgency.
In an age of haste in which many short story writers pare down the form and offer increasingly cryptic raids on narrative - most collections tend to average about a dozen stories, Eisenberg has assembled six tales of modern life. The shadow of 9/11 hangs over a couple of them with the relentlessness of foul dust. She is direct, but impressively subtle, for all the truth telling, there is a narrative, conversational ease at work that envelopes the reader. It must be difficult to craft stories that appear so effortless in the telling, considering the darkness of their messages.
Two are outstanding. Some Other, Better Otto begins with a domestic exchange between two partners. "I don't know why I committed us to any of those things" says the Otto of the title. Within a couple of sentences it is clear Otto is one of life's darker commentators and his partner, William, is an optimist. Otto possesses a finely tuned sense of outraged realism, courtesy of a family tragedy which has shaped his personality as well as his life. "Everyone always says, 'Don't you want to see the baby, don't you want to see the baby,' but if I did want to see a fat, bald, confused person, obviously I'd only have to look in the mirror."
The event that stimulated this exchange is a family Thanksgiving dinner. But Otto is no typical family outsider. "It had taken him - how long? - years and years to establish a viable, if not pristine, degree of estrangement from his family." Eisenberg pursues the character of Otto, the consciousness upon which this story thrives, despite the fact that the dynamic is provided by the misfortune of his sister Sharon. "When his mother died, Otto experienced an exhilarating melancholy; most of the painful encounters and obligations would now be a thing of the past. Life, with its humorous theatricality, had bestowed and revoked with one gesture, and there he abruptly was, in the position he felt he'd been born for: he was alone in the world."
Clever, middle-aged, depressed and depressing, Otto is the eldest in the family and with the death of his mother, "in the front ranks now, death's cannon fodder and so on; he had become old overnight, and free." By appearing to concentrate on Otto, Eisenberg brilliantly slips in passing references to Sharon, Otto's lovely, doomed sister. When he visits her, she is, as always, different, "an elegy from a distant sun." It is an astonishing image and typical of Eisenberg's ability to introduce lyric imagery that somehow never seems to sit awkwardly. It is an inspired portrait of a character suspended in time. Once a child genius, Sharon is now trapped in her mind. "The only truly pleasurable moments at the family dinner table" Otto thinks, "were those rare occasions when Sharon would talk . . . He remembered one evening . . . she was wearing a red sweater; pink barrettes held back her hair. She was speaking of holes in space - holes in nothing! No, not in nothing. Sharon explained patiently - in space. And the others, older and larger, laid down their speared meat and listened, uncomprehending and entranced, as though to distant, wordless singing." Her descent into lucid madness is as beautiful as a hymn and its impact on Otto's life is so well handled by Eisenberg that the reader can only pause and wonder at the sadness of it.
In another sublime narrative, Like It Or Not, Kate, a divorced biology teacher from Ohio, seeks out an old friend and visits Italy. The two women have just about kept in touch through infrequent calls and letters but have not seen each other for years. Kate arrives at Giovanna's home but Giovanna continues going to work, leaving Kate on her own, "staring at churches, paintings, and fountains. What had she seen? She couldn't have said."
By way of entertaining Kate, Giovanna suggests that she accompany one of her friends who is travelling down to check his old farmhouse. The friend, "Harry", sources art and is a dilettante of sorts who could have stepped from the pages of Henry James, or, as the story unfolds, Nabokov. Eisenberg evokes the stage of life Kate has reached: "women of her age were conspicuous on their own. People tended to pity, even fear you."
Yet the real pathos is reserved for Harry as Kate has a natural jauntiness that will sustain her. The two characters are miraculously juxtaposed and, as throughout this collection, Eisenberg demonstrates that the art of the short story is about drawing her reader from the opening sentence, and never relaxing the teller's control until the final word arrives like the last lingering note of a piece of music that stays in your head.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Twilight of the Superheroes By Deborah Eisenberg. Picador, 225pp, £14.99
