The Spine Of The Story
We’re reading Deborah Eisenberg’s Twilight of the Superheroes in my fiction workshop this week, which I’m really glad of, as I would otherwise have been unlikely to re-visit it, and I would have missed a lot that I didn’t get on my first reading, when the book came out in 2006. I was really into Eisenberg’s previous work then, but for some reason—the title story, I think; more on that below—I decided that since I preferred her earlier collections I didn’t “need” this one and in a fit of misdirected organization sold my hardcover copy, so now I’m reading from a trade paperback. I miss the hardcover vibe of I AM IMPORTANT ENOUGH TO BE IN HARDCOVER AND HAVE DECKLED EDGES. DECKLED!
But—reading Eisenberg. It’s like treading water in a sea of smart.
In most more or less realist fiction, author and reader depend on physical events. We may digress into hundreds of pages of philosophy and the 19th century science of whales, or go to dances or travel cross country incognito, but however slowly the story’s clock is ticking, there’s the sense that sooner or later its central concern will have physical consequences: Ahab will hunt Moby Dick, Elizabeth Bennett is not going to die a spinster; Humbert Humbert won’t be able to travel from motel to motel indefinitely. We come back to the Real, and the Real is physical, and all the literary fun of ideas springs from and rebounds to that. I think that as readers and writers we draw an invisible spine of sorts, from the start of the story to where we see it going. Lots of things can hang from that spine in the meantime—the whaling stuff, philosophy, setting, the past, ‘B-plot.’ Even To The Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway work this way; we’re going to end up at Mrs. Dalloway’s party; we will or we won’t get to the lighthouse. In fact the multiple points of view mean that, however obliquely presented, multiple spines support Woolf’s (apparent) digressions.
In these later Eisenberg stories the physical may conjure the story into being—an unwelcome Thanksgiving dinner in “Some Other, Better Otto,” downtown post-9/11 in “Twilight…”—but the real drama is internal; the backbone of the stories is characters’ consciousness, conveyed in fluent narration that travels time, dips into scenes and back into its own internal monologue. More so than in Eisenberg’s earlier collections, these characters seem to share the same concerns, so we riff between viewpoints, into different attitudes and concerns, but the voice is similar: urban, articulate, restless, incessantly correcting itself. A frequent phrase is “or at least,” bracketing a statement as soon as it’s made. If you’re not up this kind of rumination, you’ll lose patience pretty quickly.
But I love how directly Eisenberg is willing to tell us what to think of something, using metaphorical language where realist orthodoxy would finger-waggingly tell us show, don’t tell:
It was as if the chemistry of [Sharon’s] personality burned off the cushion of air between herself and others.
Sharon has unspecified mental issues; Sharon is a genius, and, Eisenberg tells us
at a certain point… among the whirling particles and ineffable numbers, something leaked in her mind, smudging the text of the cosmos, and she was lost.
Perfect… something leaked. Narration (as opposed to scenes or even summarized scenes) is greatly underrated in “how to write” texts, and it’s easily overlooked in workshops. We deny ourselves a lot as writers if we rule out this kind of language. It’s so precise. But you’d better nail it if you’re going to try it.
Eisenberg mostly nails it. In “Like It Or Not,” describing a planned excursion, she writes, “The whole thing had twisted itself into shape several days earlier at a party.” OK—so we know where the narrator stands on that! While direct in describing emotion, she’s so confident that she’ll entirely skip the logistics of getting in and out of scenes, instead using narration to pick us up and drop us down somewhere different. One character, a girl, is in a bar, talking with an older man:
“I guess my room would be better,” she continued. “[…] Mother is sure to be out prowling for you.”
They had put her in what they called the Rose Room, though except for the faint pinkish tone of the walls and the splendid four-poster, it was deliciously austere.
He perched on the chaise…
Toto, I don’t think we’re not in the bar anymore… For all that these are slow stories, Eisenberg is very fleet-footed. No agonizing over every detail of a room, or characters’ appearances.
Less successful for me was the title story, a post-9/11 reverie about a bunch of New Yorkers at loose ends. I finished “Twilight…” in a fury—not at Osama or the Bush administration but at the story. I don’t inherently object to a political message in fiction, but here the metaphors seemed slack—9/11 described as “when the sky fell”? The language should distill, not subtract from, the visceral quality of what it was like.
Where in “Some Other, Better Otto” and “Like It Or Not” Eisenberg’s method succeeds because the direct observations seem at once perfect and unique, and the complex interweaving of characters and situations counterpoint one another well. In “Twilight Of The Superheroes,” we have the real thing to compare her creation to. Fiction should be able do better than “Washington was dropping bombs on Afghanistan,” or New York Magazine commentary on fashions in pets. Maybe with a situation so visceral, a different method works better, staying as close to the thing itself; no metaphor, no fancifulness; a method that recedes and makes us less aware of the telling, of the construction of the story. My reading could be borne not only out of taste but out of proximity; I was in midtown on 9/11, and while I knew no one who died, I knew lots of people who lost friends, co-workers, loved ones; and I lived through the choking years afterwards, when Manhattan felt simultaneously under lockdown and completely exposed. I haven’t felt the need to write about that in fiction yet. Maybe I will. But is how it was, being there, enough of a subject, enough of a spine?
I enjoy having my expectations confounded in the way these stories do. But to a newcomer to Eisenberg I’d recommend All Around Atlantis—a greater variety of voices, and a greater sense of consequence and motion to what’s on the page.
