Deborah Eisenberg, _Twilight of the Superheroes_

EISENBERG WRITES WHAT I would loosely call "New Yorker stories": graceful, tasteful, mainly about family fissures (between spouses, between siblings, between generations) among the relatively prosperous and well-educated. Nothing wrong with that--it's just that there are so many of them already one has small appetite for more. Eisenberg's are in the top drawer of that category, though... in the Alice Munro class.

Like Munro's, her stories run in the 30-50 page range, room enough to get a more novelistic sense of the character's surround and history, which Eisenberg takes full advantage of. (The length would also make them far too long for the New Yorker of the post-Shawn era, I imagine; the stories in this collection mainly appeared in quarterlies.)

Another Munro-esque quality, a more important one, is that Eisenberg's stories are wise. I recently read Walter Benjamin's essay "The Storyteller," which was even richer than I remembered it, and one of his points was that we expect from "stories" a wisdom, some kind of truth about life and living it,  that we do not so much expect from novels. A few novelists count as wise--Tolstoy, George Eliot--but we rarely think of even great novelists, Woolf, Joyce, Proust, as wise, exactly, insightful and perceptive though they are. Wisdom decocts into proverbs, and novelists since Flaubert have generally avoided inserting proverbs.

Eisenberg does not include proverbs any more than Munro does, but she seems to know how people are. For instance, the prickly, easily-offended man who gives everyone, including his husband, reason to think he is an unrepentant asshole, yet strains every nerve to be gentle and thoughtful with his brilliant-but-damaged sister. Or the near-retirement teacher finally taking her Italian vacation. Or the just-out-of-college, still-having-fun friends scratching about for opportunities in New York when history dramatically ends their salad days on 9/11. Or the wife and mother who finds herself in the middle of a toxic conflict between her husband and her son, both of whom expect her full support, and is suddenly presented with a short interval in which she can leave their Oedipal mishegoss temporarily behind.

Particularly impressive for me was "Window," where Eisenberg steps a good distance away from the milieus and people she is most familiar with and writes about a young woman who ends up partnered with a survivalist gun dealer and then has to get away, taking with her the toddler from the survivalist's previous relationship. Eisenberg helps us see the appeal of the survivalist--he is capable and principled--but also the threat he poses, with his insistence that the young woman be as socially isolated as he is and his potential for violence. She also has to somehow convey the interiority of someone who has had little education and experienced little of the wider world, and she does so persuasively and without condescension.