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Executive Times |
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2006 Book Reviews |
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Twilight
of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Kapow! Each of the six short stories in
Deborah Eisenberg’s new collection, Twilight
of the Superheroes packs a wallop. Few contemporary writers are as adroit
as Eisenberg at transporting readers inside the lives of characters and
settings. While the families she creates may not mirror our own, the human
conflicts are all familiar and Eisenberg’s images are always perfect. Here’s
an excerpt, from the beginning of the story titled, “Like It or Not,” pp.
91-97: Kate would have a little tour of the
coast, Giovanna would have the satisfaction of having provided an excursion
for her American houseguest without having to interrupt her own work, and the
man whom everyone called Harry would have the pleasure, as Giovanna put it,
of Kate’s company: demonstrably a good thing for all concerned. “I wish this weren’t
happening,” Kate said. “I’ll be inconveniencing him. And besides—” “No.” Giovanna waved a
finger. “This is the point. He goes every few months to check on this place
of his. He loves to show people about, he loves to poke around the little
shops. So, why not? You’ll go with him as far as one of the towns, you’ll give
him a chance to shop, you’ll give him a chance to shine, you’ll spend the
night at some pleasant hotel, then he’ll go on and you’ll find your way back
here by taxi and train.” So, yes—it was hard to say
just who was doing whom a favor... “The coast is very
beautiful,” Giovanna added. “You don’t feel like enjoying such things right
now, I know, but right now is when your chance presents itself.” The whole thing had twisted
itself into shape several days earlier at a party—a noisy roomful of
Giovanna’s friends. Harry had been speaking to Kate in English, but his unplaceable accent and the wedges of other languages
flashing around Kate chopped up her concentration. She tried to follow his
voice—he was obliged to go frequently to the coast Had she left enough in the
freezer? Brice and Blair were hardly children, but whenever they came back
home they reverted to sheer incompetence. Besides, they’d be so busy dealing
with their father And was Kate fond of it? the person, Harry, was asking. “Fond of . . .” She searched his face. “Oh. Well,
actually I’ve never . . .” and
then both she and he were silenced, rounding this corner of the conversation
and seeing its direction. Giovanna had simply stood
there, smiling a bright, vague smile, as though she couldn’t hear a thing.
And Harry had been polite—technically, at least; Kate gave him every opportunity
to weasel out of an invitation to her, but he’d shouldered the burden
manfully And so there it was, the thing that was going to happen, like it or
not. Still, Giovanna was right. And perhaps the very fact that Kate was in no
mood to do anything proved, in fact, that she should submit gracefully to
whatever . . . opportunity came her way Over and over, now that she was
visiting Giovanna, she’d recall—the phone ringing, herself answering . . . as if, listening hard enough this time,
she might hear something different. Sitting on the sofa, shoes off. . . It was December 3,
the date was on the quizzes she was grading. She’d almost knocked over her
cup of tea, answering the phone with her hands full of papers. “Has Baker
talked to you about what’s going on with him?” It was the gentleness of She’d sent out her annual Christmas
letter: Sorry to be late this year, everyone,
(as usual!) but school seems to get more and more time-consuming. Always more
administrative annoyances, more student crises . . . This year we had to learn a new drill,
in addition to the fire drill and the cyclone drill—a drive-by shooting
drill! You can tell how old all the teachers here are by what we do when that
bell goes off. Anyone else remember the atomic-bomb drill? Whenever the
alarm rings I still just dive under the desk. Blair is surviving her first
year of law school. Brice swears he’ll never . . . and so on. She looked at what she’d
written—apparently a description of her life. To Giovanna’s copy she appended a note:
“I’m fine, really, but Baker’s sick. Very. And Blair and Brice are here this
week spending days with him and Norman, nights with me. Blair’s fiancé calls
every few hours, frantically apologizing. He pleads, she storms. Grand opera!
Will she just please tell him why she’s angry? She’s not angry, she
insists—it’s just all this apologizing I guess the diva-gene skipped a
generation. Speaking of which, Mother asks after you. She still talks about
how that boring friend of Baker’s followed you back to Giovanna faxed Kate at school: Come
stay over spring break. No excuses. It had been so many years
since they’d seen each other, letters were so rarely exchanged, that Giovanna had come to seem abstract; Kate hadn’t even
been aware of confiding. She stared at the fax as she went into her
classroom. The map was still rolled down over the blackboard from the
previous class. In fact, Giovanna was not only capable, evidently, of reading
the note, she was also less than fifteen inches away They had met almost thirty
years earlier at a college to which Kate had been sent for its patrician
reputation and its august location, and to which Giovanna had been exiled for
its puritanical reputation and backwater location, far removed from her own
country and her customary amusements. Kate had first encountered the famous
Giovanna in the hail outside her room, passed out on the floor, had dragged
her inside, revived her, and from then on had joyfully assisted her in and
out windows on extralegal forays, after hours, to destinations unequivocally
off-limits, with scandalously older men—the more distinguished of the
professors, local politicians, visiting lecturers and entertainers
. The two girls found one anothers’ characteristics, both
national and personal, hilarious and illuminating. They scrutinized
each other—the one stolid, socially awkward, midwestern,
and oblique; the other polished, European, and satirical—as if each were
looking into a transforming mirror, which reflected now certain qualities,
now certain others. So many possibilities had floated in that mirror! While Giovanna worked long hours at her
firm, Kate walked dutifully through the city, staring at churches, paintings,
and fountains. What had she seen? She couldn’t have said. She drew the line
absolutely she’d told Blair, at taking photographs. “But, Mother,” Blair had
said. “You’d get so much more out of your trip!” Poor Brice—how would he be
faring at home with his sister? All his life Blair had been trying to turn
him upside down and shake him, as if she could dislodge hidden problems from
his pockets like loose change. At night, Kate and Giovanna
ate in local trattorias, then sat in Giovanna’s
huge apartment, sipping wine and talking lazily How pleasant it must be to
live like Giovanna, surrounded by beauty, by beautiful objects, so many of
which had been in her family for generations. The years slid through their
conversation, looping around, forming a fragile, shifting lace. “Is it possible?”
Giovanna said. “We’re older than your mother was when we met.” “Too strange,” Kate said.
“Too scary” When she dropped by every week or so now to check on her mother,
Kate would often find her asleep in a chair, her head dropping sideways, her mouth slightly open. “Most of the time she’s still
fairly true to form, thank heavens. She’s attached the one available old gent
around and she’s running him ragged. He simply beams. All the sweet local
widows are still standing at his door, clutching their pies and pot roasts, They don’t know what hit them. You know~ all those
years, when Baker and I were having so much trouble and neither of us quite
understood what was happening and the kids were frantic and the house was
pandemonium all the time—just as we’d all start screaming at each other, the
phone would ring and there she’d be, saying, ‘So, how is everyone enjoying
this beautiful Sunday afternoon?’ Now the phone rings and she says, ‘Kate!
What are you doing at home on a Saturday night?’” “Ah, well.” Giovanna lit a
cigarette, kindling its forbidden fragrance. “She’s having an adventure. And
what about you?” “Me!” Kate said. “Me?” “What about that guy you
wrote me about a year or two ago—Rover, Rower . . .” “Rowan. Oh, lord. Blair was
very enthusiastic about that one. One day she said to me, ‘Mother, where’s
this going, this thing with Rowan?’ I said, ‘Going? I’m almost fifty!’ Giovanna exhaled a curtain
of smoke. From behind it, her steady gaze rested on Kate. “You broke it off?” “Give me a drag, please. Of
course not. Though to tell you the truth, I just don’t feel the need to put
myself through all that again. I really don’t. Anyhow, the day came,
naturally, when he said he wasn’t, guess what, ready for commitment—he actually used the word—so soon after his divorce.
And then naturally the next day
came, when I heard he’d married a twenty-three-year-old.” “You should live here.” Giovanna
yawned. “Here in Much nicer, they’d agreed,
clinking glasses. There was no stone, arch, column,
pediment, square inch of painting in the vicinity that Harry couldn’t expound
upon. He knew what pirates had lived in which of the caves below them, the
Latin names of the trees, all twisted by wind, the composition of the rocks . . . Did Kate see the dome way off there?
They didn’t have time to stop, unfortunately, but it was a very important
church, as no doubt she knew, built by X in the twelfth century, rebuilt by Y
in the thirteenth, then built again on the orders of the Archbishop of Z . . . Inside there was a wonderful
Annunciation by A, a wonderful pietà by B, and of
course she’d seen reproductions, hadn’t she, of the altar-piece. . . It wasn’t fair. He expected
everyone to be as yielding to beautiful objects as he was, as easily
transported. Her expression, she hoped, as the avalanche of information—art
gossip— rained down, was not the one she saw daily on the faces of her
students. Her poor, exasperating students, so resentful, so uncomprehending . . . The truth was that most of them had so
many problems in their lives that each precious, clarifying fragment Kate struggled
to hand over to them was just one more intrusion.Yet
there she stood, day after day, talking, talking, talking . . . And every once in a while—she could see
it—it was as if a door opened in a high stone wall. “. . . but I’m boring you,”
Harry was saying. “You’re a serious person! And my life, I’m afraid, has been
devoted, frivolously to beauty.” True, true, she was a
grunting barbarian, he was a rarified esthete. She was a high-school biology
teacher, he was a— well, he was a what, exactly? As
far as she could gather, whatever it was he did seemed to involve finding
art or rarities, oddities, for collectors and billionaires and grotesquely
expensive hotels. He’d traveled all over, there’d been a wife or two, his
family had come from everywhere—Central Asia, all around the “Mendelssohn or salsa?” He
waved a handful of CD’s “To— what is it? To soothe our savage— Ack!” He honked and swerved as a giant tour bus in front
of them braked shudderingly on the precipitous
incline. “They have no idea how to drive! Simply not a clue!” Twilight
of the Superheroes provides fine writing that leads readers to escape our
own milieu and enter the lives of Eisenberg’s characters who
will amuse, entrance and excite us. Steve Hopkins,
March 23, 2006 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the April 2006
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Twilight
of the Superheroes.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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