Through an intimate lens, the way we live now
Twilight of the Superheroes
By Deborah Eisenberg
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 225 pp., $23
For the past two decades, Deborah Eisenberg has had to content herself with being esteemed rather than merely famous. Her short stories are careful chronicles of contemporary life, unfolding from the prismatic perspective of a narrator both wise about and intimate with her characters. This quality is what you might call high realism, a definition necessary only because so many other unreal states have crowded the genre. The voice is knowing, even insinuating, but there's a regard for humanity that keeps the somber cast of her stories from taking over. She writes in what used to be known as the New Yorker tradition, until that distinction, too, became blurred with trends; it's the tradition of the old story lovers like William Trevor and Lorrie Moore, connected mostly by their pristine craft and respect for the thickness of the form.
''Twilight of the Superheroes" contains six stories, each of them tinged with sorrow and want and the missed trains of life. They range in plot from a group of young New Yorkers blinded by the events of 9/11 to a seemingly ditzy woman escaping the gilded misery of her marriage; family -- the people we choose or have to deal with -- is the connective grout here, whether cracked or holding. In ''Like It or Not," a divorced woman whose ex-husband is dying tries to flee the heartache of the past by visiting an old friend in Italy. She takes up with a proper guide, views the requisite museums and star-studded skies, finds herself nonetheless in the company of self -- a territory of memory and experience where ''time itself made no sound at all." The fey, gay, seemingly contented brother of ''Some Other, Better Otto" is a man who would appear to have everything: a devoted partner, a well-planned and privileged life, even the appropriate skepticism in dealing with his hopelessly bourgeois siblings. But it is Otto's sister Sharon -- brilliant, fragile, schizophrenic -- who has his heart, and whose downfall he carries with him as the sine qua non of experience itself. She was a girl, he believed when young, who possessed ''a tremendous capacity for metaphor" -- she was a dancer, one teacher had said, who leapt from star to star. This tragic lightness of being held the family rapt for years, as Sharon unraveled the truth of the galaxies: The siblings listened, ''uncomprehending and entranced, as though to distant, wordless singing."
These days Sharon sits alone in a room and tries to make her life bearable and functional: the tracks are parted now, ''one set leading up into the stars, the other down to the hospital." Otto, stage manager to his sister's catastrophic pitches and dives, is a man stained by love and beholden to it. Because this story focuses on the flawed and milder brother, it reveals not just the darkness of Sharon's fall but also its range of influence.
The agility of Eisenberg's compassion is what provides her work with its emotional heft. The title story is in some ways the most technically ambitious, using the cataclysmic intimacy of 9/11 to fuse the hopelessness of that day's witnesses. But while Eisenberg masterfully construes the images of that September morning into personal shocks and recoils, the story itself feels lacking. I suspect this is a predictable weakness in fiction that tries to address 9/11, in much the way you could not expect the Battle of the Somme to serve as a backdrop for anything but itself in the years after World War I. Public catastrophe trumps individual response to it, in fact and fiction, and it will take a while to get it right or to let it serve as a mere corridor to truth.
The most extraordinary piece in the collection is ''Window," which opens with a young woman named Kristina having shown up unannounced, toddler in tow, at her older sister's. Kristina has clearly pulled this before -- Alma is hardly thrilled to see her -- and yet Alma takes her in, giving her a key before leaving for work. We realize the ominous nature of the story by one piercing detail: When Noah, the child, wakes up, Kristina sees him in the dark: ''It holds out its arms to be picked up." Who knew a pronoun could be so terrifying, or so estranged? That ''it" presages the story about to be told, about the flight that Kristina has taken with Noah away from black certainty and fear and a man named Eli. And if any tale of abuse these days seems to hold a predictable outcome, this one -- fraught with romance, isolation, and archetypal fantasy -- has a conceit so rich as to render the subject newly horrifying. ''Window" calls to mind Joyce Carol Oates's classic ''Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?," which set the standard for the perilous seduction story. Like Oates's young protagonist, Kristina knows that ''everything that happens is out there waiting for you to come to it." If you're lucky and quick, you can learn that lesson and get out alive.
The last two stories in ''Twilight" are triumphs of voice and perspective. ''Revenge of the Dinosaurs" captures the vigil of a family around a dying grandmother, a milieu fraught not with grief but with pettiness, dissonance, and inanity. ''The Flaw in the Design" unfolds from the wife's perspective in a cold marriage, but it is her son -- brilliant and funny and perhaps manic-psychotic -- who provides the muscle of the story, his dinner-table accusations hinting at the reality of the greater world. The wife remembers a time in the postcolonial Third World, when she looked outside the windows of a lavish dining room and glimpsed ''a sort of explosion" before the waiter drew the drapes. It is this muffled view of life that Eisenberg seeks to extract and reveal. Her stories possess all the steely beauty of a knife wrapped in velvet.
Gail Caldwell is chief book critic of the Globe. She can be reached at caldwell@globe.com. 
