Reviews

• Short stories of Deborah Eisenberg

  Her stories are vivid, truthful and thought provoking. The best I've read for ages. It's a pity the publisher (Picador) put her into such a cheap and nasty book, she deserves the best. It's surprising that she's not more trumpeted as she's so good!

• "Billions of intense, abundant human lives on this earth..."

  This magnificent and thorough collection is a real treasure. I can think of no contemporary story writer who has such fun with language, who can cleave into the tense emotions of people we know or think we know, who knows how and when to make us laugh and when to cry. This thick tome holds all of Eisenberg's stories thus far and the most remarkable thing is that she has remained remarkably consistent through her career. The carefulness of her prose, the precision-driven sentences, empathetic plots, strong and resolute characters--these qualities make us keep reading. One of my favorite stories in the collection is a later one, "Revenge of the Dinosaurs." In it, a young woman flies back to New York to sort out her dying grandmother's apartment. In the process of fielding the searing emotional demands of two important men in her life--her brother and her boyfriend--she focuses on the intensity of considering her Nana's life and what it meant. In the process, Eisenberg zeroes in on some of the most radically "real" moments all of us must and do face by virtue of being alive. She plumbs the ways in which the subconscious can influence what seem to be deliberate decisions. Consider the following passage from "Revenge": "There weren't going to be many artifacts. There wasn't going to be much for the world to remember our shiny Nana by except for example her small hard rectangular book on currency. It's incredible. I can't quite ever really wrap my head around it, that each life is amazingly abundant. No matter what. And every moment of experience is so intense, but so little evidence of that exists outside the living body. Billions of intense, abundant human lives on this earth, Nana's among them, vanishing, leaving nothing more than inscrutable little piles of commemorative trash." This is poetry, poetry to commit to memory. I love Deborah Eisenberg's beautiful stories and think you will too.

• Eisenberg has three great virtues: a clear

  Eisenberg has three great virtues: a clear, beautiful and economical prose style; the ability to create three-dimensional characters; and the ability to create fascinating plots. I must note one (or more) critical reviews here complain that the plots of the stories do not have clear endings. Most of these stories have implied endings: you can see where the plot is going and what the main character(s) are going to do ("Under the 82d Airborne'. for instance). Many great story-writers have this 'slice of life' approach: Chekov, Trevor, and others. The stories themselves are usually original and fascinating. The two most common scenes are New York and its suburbs, or expats living in a Latin American country. The latter stories are pretty political: having lived in LA in the 80s and 90s, I met many refugees from Mexico and Central America, and the horror stories they told verify even the most unbelievable Eisenberg plots in these locales. Most of the stories, though, are about East Coast metropolitan and suburban middle-class life, and almost all are fascinating: once you've read the first few pages, you can't stop until you have finished. Some of the characters you just fall in love with: "The Girl Who dropped the sock on the floor", for instance. Eisenberg is perhaps the greatest American writer of the last twenty years (unless T. C. Boyle is).

• Eisenberg has an amazing ability to take what could be construed as triteness ...

  Interesting, well crafted modern stories. Eisenberg has an amazing ability to take what could be construed as triteness and elevate it to poetic angst.

• Impeccable

  Sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, these are the most consistently fascinating and enigmatic stories I've ever read. Eisenberg is the master of exploring those mysterious things that happen to make or break, usually break, relationships. More than any other writer, her dialogue approximates what really happens when people talk, or try to talk to one another. The ellipses, the unfinished sentences, the leaps of thought are all there along with the pregnant pauses in which silence coils like a lethal snake. As if that weren't enough, her sense of humor, wry, ironic, is like no one else's.

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