Review by New York Times Review
IN HER FIFTH COLLECTION of short Stories, "Your Duck Is My Duck," Deborah Eisenberg speaks in the voice of a despairing god: wry, cool, resonant, capable of three dimensions of irony at once, besotted with the beauty and tragedy of this darkening planet of ours. Every story in the new collection - oh, who am I kidding? every story Deborah Eisenberg has ever written - holds at least one image that can knock you to your knees. The voice of a driver is, to a sleepy passenger, "a harsh silver ribbon glinting in the fleecy dark"; a black and twisting tornado crossing a field is "like a dancer filled with God." Eisenberg has an attentiveness so radical that her stories often feel to the reader the way that sung lieder in her story "Recalculating" seem to be "of a loveliness so distilled and potent" that a character feels as though he is being poisoned. Beauty that spreads through the mind and lingers there in alterations so deep they're almost physical: This is what I love most about Eisenberg's work. I crave her voice in the years between books so much that I am almost continually rereading a story of hers: "Days" from "Transactions in a Foreign Currency," "Mermaids" from "All Around Atlantis," "Some Other, Better Otto" from "Twilight of the Superheroes," and on and on. Eisenberg is a gorgeous writer of lines and dialogue and paragraphs, all the artistry in the marks upon the page, but even more deeply - and much more interestingly - she is an artist of the unsaid: the unacknowledged silences in a family, the imaginative volta between seemingly disparate images, the barely intimated strangenesses of the world. Nature abhors a vacuum, they say, and into the spaces Eisenberg deliberately leaves open, the reader's own terrors and interpretations can seep in. In the title story of her new collection, "Your Duck Is My Duck," there is an almost unbearable tension between the bright, sharp surface and the great glimpsed beasts moving in the deeps. The story is funny, ostensibly about a rich couple in an unhappy marriage who host artists at their paradisal island. The narrator is a burnt-out painter whose work has recently been acquired by the rich couple, and the only other artist in residence is a puppeteer who is working on an operatic puppet show that is obviously critical of the hosts, called "The Hand That Feeds You." It is all very light and funny, but between the lines live myriad other issues, obliquely observed: the way unchecked capitalism ruins us all; the way an artist is made culpable by accepting aid given by corrupt sources; the way soulless corporations have turned themselves into a higher power in our society, taking the place of God; the way climate change is exacerbated by the greed and meddling of the stupidly rich. The verdant island of little farms that the narrator so admires is in the process of being destroyed, first by two years of rain so intense that the crops fail, then drought so severe that the new plantings are blown away, then the abandoned farms are bought up by the host, whose new plantings of eucalyptus catch fire in lightning storms and burn everything down, including the remaining farms, which makes food prices skyrocket and drives the indigenous population to flee en masse. At last, when the eucalyptus trees are torn out, the bluffs erode and the very last farms are covered in mudslides. This history of disaster is made more devastating by the fact that Eisenberg manages to give the reader this history in fragments, as though from a muttered phone conversation from another room just audible under the dinner party conversation you've been having with the funniest people you know. There is a deep moral resonance in the dual voice: The title of the story comes from a koan the rich capitalist cites for his corporate peons, something about a Zen master, his disciple and a duck trapped in a bottle. He finishes the story by laying out the master's lesson: "It's not my duck, it's not my bottle, it's not my problem," he says, meaning that he won't bestir himself to act for good if he's not morally culpable in the problem. But the title says otherwise: Your duck is my duck. We are all culpable. We are all responsible for one another. OTHER STORIES IN the collection also reach toward large ideas. In "Taj Mahal," the outrageous tell-all biography of a film director by his grandson shows, to the director's actor friends who were actually around for the events described, the mutability of recounted memory as it swallows lived experience. There's an obsession with the essential nature of words in both "Merge," in which a girl deep in perhaps malarial fever "watches for the ephemeral shapes, rising above the dark horizon like iridescent soap bubbles, of the first words to be uttered on the planet," and in the dystopia of "The Third Tower," about another girl, who, with her beautifully associative imagination, senses "words heating up, expanding, exploding into pictures of things, shooting off in all directions, then flaming out, leaving behind cinders and husks, a litter of tiny, empty winged corpses, like scorched gnats or angels." As a result, she is seen as possessing "aberrant cortical activity" and is put through a harsh hospital treatment until her sense of words is diminished to mean only what they mean. In "Recalculating" and "Cross Off and Move On," family inheritance is a source of longing and trauma; the latter story also holds a gorgeous tiny ars poetica when a young girl, in her Holocaust survivor aunts' house, pauses "to stare at some object or small piece of statuary until its transporting properties warm up. The ghosts flimmer in their chairs, the hieroglyphics rise in the rugs, the stopped gilt clocks and cracked ornaments begin to pulse with the living current of their memories, and a few filmy pictures, too faded to see clearly - streetcars and cafes and people in heavy, old-fashioned clothing hurrying along in a cold, twilit city - peel off into the sparkling dust." Stare hard, Eisenberg tells us, and watch the banal world transform into marvels. Your duck may be my duck, but my voice of God is not necessarily your voice of God: Theologies are personal, and a reader made uncomfortable by ambiguity, submerged plot, a sense of dizzy dislocation or a sudden leap from idea to idea midsentence would likely have a hard time with "Your Duck Is My Duck." It should be clear by now that my personal belief system is one that loves an omniscient voice as mysterious as Eisenberg's, and I thank my stars that there's a writer in the increasingly imperiled world as smart and funny and blazingly moral and devastatingly sidelong as she is. Great writers show us the corruption at the heart of the world and stand furious witness with us. The comfort they give can be stark, brutal, unflinching, but it is by no means small: It's the comfort of knowing that though we may all be in trouble, we are not here in this mess alone. LAUREN GROFF'S most recent book is "Florida," a short story collection. Into the open spaces, the reader's own terrors seep in.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
So, you're born, and then what? How would anybody know anything about anybody? In her first book after The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (2010), Eisenberg's anxiously questioning narrators bumble through life, dangerously muddled by or porous to the absurdities of human endeavors, their skittery musings swerving between sorrow and breathtaking humor. In the ambushing title story, a bereft artist is offered refuge at a rich couple's beach estate, largesse that turns bizarrely disastrous as Eisenberg adroitly transforms the personal into the global. In the hilarious and bittersweet Taj Mahal, a man's memoir about his famous Hollywood-director grandfather stirs up a coterie of surviving actors riled by age and memory's unreliability. Generational divides lead to droll and provocative standoffs in stories of abandonment, truths withheld, dangerous quests, crimes against humanity, and glimpses of a catastrophic near-future. Summoning her aerodynamic imagination and wondrous linguistic litheness, Eisenberg leaps with acrobatic grace from the everyday to the wildly unexpected in acts of radiant and unnerving clarification. Eisenberg's incisively exhilarating fiction syncs with that of Margaret Atwood, A. M. Homes, and Lydia Millet.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The six superlative and entertaining stories of Eisenberg's fifth collection (after 2006's Twilight of the Superheroes) mostly follow the wayward lives of upper-class Americans whose tragic vanities exaggerate the common human qualities that undermine all types of people. The title story follows a painter who has lost her way and finds it again in the tropical home of a volatile and exploitative wealthy couple. The amazing "Taj Mahal" introduces a cast of aging golden-era film stars who have gathered to debunk, complain about, and revel in the scathing memoir written by the grown son of the director who was once the center of their circle. The debasements and excesses of the Trump era are a frequent inspiration if not a subject-"Merge," which bears an ironic epigraph from the current president ("I know words. I have the best words."), is a novella-length mystery about the ne'er-do-well son of a captain of industry, who is guided in an epistolary quest by his weirdo lover. Eisenberg is funny, grim, biting, and wise, but always with a light touch and always in the service of worlds that extend far beyond the page. A virtuoso at rendering the flickering gestures by which people simultaneously hide and reveal themselves, Eisenberg is an undisputed master of the short story. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Once again, MacArthur Fellow -Eisenberg (Twilight of the Superheroes) deploys her brand of entertainingly sharp cultural insight, using fine portraiture to show life's messiness and the great gap that often looms between how things are and how we want or imagine them to be. A mother relentlessly compares her daughter favorably to a violin prodigy cousin while viciously critiquing her own sisters-in-law, the daughter's beloved aunts; even the young woman's rationalizing boyfriend must finally concede, "Your mother is mean as a mace." A group of octogenarian actors famed in their day gather to pick apart a memoir written by an esteemed director's grandson, who portrays them in a bad light-or at least not as they see themselves. The daughter of the deceased Zoe, once part of the group, recalls her mother revealing at life's end what she wished she had seen but refusing an offer of plane tickets; "Just let me lie here and yearn to see the Taj Majal." A young artist is delighted if puzzled when she's taken up by a wealthy couple who bought one of her paintings; in the end, she realizes she's just part of their drama. -VERDICT Important for collections of good literature. [See Prepub Alert, 3/26/18.] © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A vivid mix of stories that pick up and expand on Eisenberg's (The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg, 2010, etc.) signature concerns.Eisenberg is among our most interesting writers of short fiction, author of four previous collections that track the dislocation of her characters in ways both large and small. Of the six pieces in this, her first book in 12 years, five appeared in venues such as the Paris Review and the New York Review of Books; one garnered an O. Henry Award. It's not hard to understand why. Eisenberg's mtier is reticence: Her characters move through a world they find bewildering, with no easy strategy to reach out and connect. In the title story, an artist finds herself at the beach home of a rich couple, in a country that could be Mexico. What looks like paradise, however, is an illusion, a landscape on the verge of chaos from overlapping cycles of drought and flooding and the excesses of the expatriate economy. "So naturally," Eisenberg writes, "local people who could leave were leaving, and a lot of the foreignerswho had places in the area were pulling up stakes, too." Place, in other words, exerts a very shallow pull. The same is true of family, which echoes here like a set of lost opportunities, more obligatory than consoling. "Merge" revolves, in part, around the son of a corrupt CEO who liberates himself from his father by forging a $10,000 check. "Cross Off and Move On" looks back at its narrator's three aunts, although, she acknowledges, "They come to mind not so often. They come to mind only as often as does my mother, whose rancor toward them, my father's sisters, imbued them with a certain luster and has linked them to her permanently." Here, we see Eisenberg's approach to narrative, which is to tell us something both incidental and important and then follow it where it goes. The stories here are long, most more than 30 pages, and they take their time in getting to the point. But that's OK; in fact, it's the whole pleasure of reading her, the assurance that there is no quick fix, no easy resolution, that things are as muddy, as complicated on the page as they are in the world. What is never muddy, though, is her writing, which is sharp and pointed and direct. "In our small city," she writes, "where darkness and cold go on and on and most things smell and taste like lint, I groan with longing."These brilliant stories invoke the desire for something other than what you've been given, which applies to us as much as to Eisenberg's characters, whose distracted desperation can't help, in the end, but reflect our own. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
