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Deborah Eisenberg's fugitive souls

by Matthew Debord

ALL AROUND ATLANTIS,
by Deborah Eisenberg. Farrar, Straus &Giroux, 208 pages, $22.

Deborah Eisenberg is one of those "maybe should've been"s -- like David Salle, who maybe should've been a critic instead of a painter, or Keanu Reeves, who maybe should've been a rock god instead of a movie star. Eisenberg should perhaps have steered toward psychoanalysis. Of course, all writers maybe should've been something else; because they aren't, they write.

In her third collection of stories -- the first two, Transactions in a Foreign Currency and Under the 82nd Airborne, were combined in this year's The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg -- the 52-year-old Eisenberg demonstrates that she can achieve in a short story the sort of acute human insight that contemporaries such as Paul Auster require entire novels to match. Her compression of whole chapters' worth of information into a clutch of dialogue or a strip of description makes for reading that rarely forgives inattention.

Remember when you were six and your parents decided you should learn to swim, so they took you to the pool and tossed you in? That's a fair approximation of what it's like to read a Deborah Eisenberg short story. The rewards are plentiful, the risks considerable -- and pity the poor reader who flounders amid the depths of, for instance, the collection's title story. Each of these seven tales involves the invigoration of an unlived life via the shock therapy of the present. Eisenberg's Atlantians all suffer from challenged recollection: it's up to Eisenberg to supply the narrative couch, if not the linguistic life-vest.

"[Y]ou've got to get rid of that thing inside you that pulls you along toward the end of the line," argues Rosie, the recovering junkie of "Rosie Gets a Soul," the collection's best offering. Delivering a flinty aphorism that could summarize the whole book, she continues: "Because if you want to go anywhere, the end of the line is the only destination." Eisenberg rehabilitates the obvious by taking readers on a harrowing journey; in Rosie, a "reverse pioneer," she matches the precarious resolve of a young woman fighting the banality of her post-heroin existence with the clichés of an impossible romance. In this case, Rosie stumbles into an awkward flirtation with the husband of a wealthy woman whose house Rosie is helping to decorate. Mixing Marxist rhetoric with snippets of Judith Krantz -- "the thick padding of wealth soaks up disturbance," but the husband "runs a hand through his black-and-silver hair" -- Eisenberg guides Rosie through an abortive indiscretion whose sole payoff is a "single kiss more debilitating than whole encounters she's had in bed." It ultimately restores Rosie's faith in a drug older than love or smack: her own ego.

A pair of other stories, "The Girl Who Left Her Sock on the Floor" and "Mermaids," showcase Eisenberg's uncanny skill at burrowing into grown-up scars to recover the fresh cuts of adolescence. The first tale finds a girl plucked from boarding school, after the sudden death of her mother. Stunned to discover that the father she had been told was dead is actually living in New York, she undertakes an impromptu trip to Manhattan, carrying her mother's cremated remains, to meet the parent who "wasn't . . . a guy who'd been mashed by a bus." The second chronicles a more sordid visit to Gotham: 11-year-old Kyla, her vindictive schoolmate Janey, and Janey's jittery, kindergarten-age sister, Alice, accompany the sisters' philandering father, who is using the trip as an excuse to cheat on his wife.

Eisenberg started out as a playwright, and "Across the Lake" demonstrates her nearly peerless talent for integrating soliloquy and dialogue, as well as her sharpshooter's gift for description. The story's reluctant adventurer, Rob, finds himself south of the border, stuck with Mick and Mick's girlfriend, Suky -- whose sweat "collects in small basins around each gold stalklet of hair, in tiny, septic, bejeweling drops" -- and eager to escape before he either gets sick on the food or is shot by guerrillas. Repelled by Suky's casual filthiness, he nonetheless submits to his desires for her during his darkest hour.

Expatriatism -- the state Joyce would have isolated as cunning exile -- and travel are recurrent concerns for Eisenberg. Her characters -- whether they're the lonely, aging leftists of "Tlaloc's Paradise," who decamped for Mexico during the McCarthy era, or the failed concert pianist of "Someone to Talk To," who encounters a decrepit hack journalist with a political chip on his shoulder when he's sucked into lackeydom at a pan-American music festival hosted by a US-supported dictatorship -- are repeatedly trapped in places where, to snatch a phrase from Gertrude Stein, there's no there. With this exquisite collection, Eisenberg has contrived a thrilling, purifying tour of the fugitive soul. To follow her is to visit territories, both familiar and foreign, that no American has so masterfully roadmapped since Flannery O'Connor.