Calling All Superheroes

DEBORAH EISENBERG'S LATEST TRIUMPH

The next time some lit-crit nincompoop pronounces the short story dead and proclaims the novel to be the thing, one need only point out that Deborah Eisenberg has just published her seventh stunning collection, Twilight of the Superheroes, and proved that the form is very much in the pink. The new book, from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, demonstrates Eisenberg's astonishing ability to create stories brimming with big ideas and deft social commentary. In prose that is comic, elegant, and pitch-perfect, Eisenberg illustrates the lives of people rubbed raw w by by what the Fates have sent them. A young woman falls for an arms dealer and his toddler son, a brother is pained by his relationship with his schizophrenic sister, and in the title story a group of postcollegiate pals witness the terrorist attacks of 9/11 up close. In pared-down, lucid language Eisenberg distills the horror of the day when "something flashed and something tore, and the cloudless sky ignited." But most astutely she captures the way that, while a disaster changes you forever, the ordinariness of life—working at a job, coping with family, falling in love—goes on, which is both necessary and sad. In each story Eisenberg articulates a facet of human experience that seems beyond words. Tell me that isn't a superpower.

E.S.