Twilight of the Superheroes
Deborah Eisenberg
Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2006
“It was infuriating enough just trying to have contact with a few other people, let alone with all of one’s selves!” muses a character in Twilight of the Superheroes, Deborah Eisenberg’s new collection of short stories that ponders the possibility of true human connection in a post-9/11 world. With these six stories, Eisenberg, who has often been described as an American Alice Munro, glances into the bitter disappointments that underscore the everyday lives of a variety of New Yorkers. Many of these tightly woven tales play out against a bleak, nihilistic New York City that is a character in itself, looming over alternating dramas of aging and loss.
The juxtaposition of what amounts to life and death is especially true for the title story, which features a group of twenty-somethings whose lives revolve around a comic book artist named Nathaniel, whose idyllic experience living across from the World Trade Center was shattered in September of 2001. The experience of Nathaniel and his friends is beautifully contrasted with the memories of Nathaniel’s uncle, Lucien, who saw New York as a safe haven in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Eisenberg focuses on the political and emotional aftermath of 9/11 rather than on details of the attacks themselves. Such an orientation captures “the terrifying surprise” of “the sight that had been hidden by the curtain, of all those irrepressibly, murderously angry people.”
Though her self-conscious, political meditations on the significance of history feel a bit forced, her deft storytelling skills more than compensate. Rather than plotting her tales in linear time, Eisenberg thrusts the reader into the middle of the scene and delivers the emotional punch of disillusionment at just the right moment. The plots gradually begin to unfold through the skillful entwining of past and present, inner thought and outer consciousness. Her characters often seem lost, adrift in their own emotional and physical placelessness. The lines they straddle – between sanity and madness, hope and despair – are deftly evoked with adjectives like “corroded” or “impoverished,” used to describe the futility of human interaction.
Other than the title piece, the most memorable stories of the collection include the marvelous “Some Other, Better Otto,” which explores the complexities of familial neuroses through the eyes of an irascible lawyer and his brilliant but mentally unstable sister. The novella-length “Window,” one of the few pieces to leave the familiar territory of the city, is another high point, turns what could have been a clichéd tale of spousal abuse into a frightening meditation on the complexity of relationships. Ultimately, Eisenberg’s stories provide no easy solution to the existential dilemmas of living in what may be a post-apocalyptic age, but for those readers willing to travel the journey with her, there is no better guide.
