It has just been announced that
Deborah Eisenberg has won the 2015 PEN/Malamud award for excellence in short
fiction. She won the Rea Award in 2000 for her mastery of the short story form.
Her Collected Stories, which was
published in 2010, includes stories from
four earlier collections: Transactions
in a Foreign Currency (1986), Under
the 82nd Airborne (1992), All Around
Atlantis (1997), and Twilight of the
Superheroes (2007).
The short story’s lack of room to
ruminate about so-called “big”socio-political
issues is one reason the form is not popular with so-called “serious”
critics who prefer genres that generalize. The kind of complexity that
fascinates masters of the short story is not captured by using more and more
words but by using just the right ones. Good stories, like good poems, don’t
pontificate.
The best stories in Eisenberg's collection
Twilight of the Superheroes (2007)
reflect her continuing conscientious effort to provide a structure and a syntax
for feelings unspeakable until just the right rhythm makes what was loose and
lying around inside clench and cluster into a meaningful pattern.
In “Some Other, Better Otto,” the
central character is so self-negating, so full of doubt and dubiousness that
you just want to smack him. But you know
he can’t help it, that of all his possible selves he cannot quite seem to find
that other, better one that would make his life full and complete. However,
what great short story writers like Eisenberg wisely know is that there is no
unified self, only rare moments of recognition, evanescent contacts of
communication.
South African writer Nadine
Gordimer once said that the novel is often bound to a consistency that does not
convey the true quality of human life, “where contact is more like the flash of
fireflies.” Short-story writers,
Gordimer says, “see by the light of the flash; theirs is the art of the only
thing one can be sure of—the present moment.”
In “Like It or Not,” a divorced Midwestern
high school biology teacher visits a sophisticated friend in Italy and is
expertly guided about by a polished and knowledgeable European man. Like a delicate Jamesian romance, nothing
much happens but much is immanent. It's
not just that the man feels he is getting older or that the woman feels
insecurely empty, but, rather, as the man tells a young woman they encounter in
a hotel, “It’s quite mysterious, what attracts one human being to
another.”
This is the kind of mystery that
great short-story writers, such as Chekhov, have always struggled with. As the central character of his brilliant
story “Lady with the Pet Dog” inchoately understands, people have two lives,
one open and known by all who cared to know, and another life, running its
course in secret.
However, when Eisenberg veers away
from the secret flashes and mysterious motivations that the short story
captures so delicately and moves toward the socio-political generality of the
novel, she lapses into generalities.
In the title story, four young
people live in a kind of “holding pattern” in a luxurious apartment in New York
City. One of them draws a comic strip
entitled Passivityman about a superhero indifferent to “Captain Corporation who
tightens his Net of Evil around The Planet Earth.” Having lost the superpowers of their youth,
they are witness to the terrorist attack on the twin towers and somehow their
private lives are absorbed by the “arid wasteland of policy and strategy” and
the story evaporates into abstraction and rumination.
Eisenberg
is indeed a master of the short story.
She succeeds much more often than she fails because she brilliantly
exploits what the form does best. It’s
only when she seems to be seduced by the public demand for the novelistic that
she breaks faith with the great masters who have preceded her, like the namesake
of the award she has most deservedly just won.
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