‘Merge’ by Deborah Eisenberg

Deborah Eisenberg’s works are often studies in perception of the world. So it is with this story. Told from different perspectives and introduced by epigraphs from Noam Chomsky and Donald Trump, it is also a reflection on language as a phenomenon inextricably linked to contemporary ills: “a way for us to deceive ourselves into believing that we understand things, so then we can just go ahead and do stuff that’s more ruthless than what any other animal does”.

Our relationship with words is overrated, “Merge” suggests. Some of us make “mental objects out of them”, to quote Chomsky; others simply declare, after Trump, “I have the best words”; in any case, speech alone is not enough to give us human status. Language is nothing but “an extremely plastic faculty, amenable to many uses, but it developed to serve the pressing demands of malice, vengefulness, and greed – humanity’s most consistent attributes”. And then, as you keep reading, the very language of the story proves that wrong.

First published in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Fall 2018, and available to read to subscribers here, and via JStor here. Collected in Your Duck Is My Duck, Europa Editions, 2019

‘Some Other, Better Otto’ by Deborah Eisenberg

From one love story to another. Are you a romantic? I’m pretty sure I am, dangerous as that is. And I get more so the older I get, even though I think it’s meant to work the other way around. I first read this story in Granta’s anthology New American Stories, and then again in another anthology My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead, a selection of love stories edited by Jeffrey Eugenides. So who am I to prevent it from making the hattrick? But that, of course, isn’t the reason I want it here. It’s because it is so very lovely. The hope we all have, that someone deeply good will love us despite ourselves is what keeps the world turning, our hearts beating.

First published in The Yale Review, 1 January 2003, and available to read here; collected in My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead, HarperPress, 2008 and New American Stories, Granta, 2016

‘Some Other, Better Otto’ by Deborah Eisenberg

‘“We’re not people – we’re family.”’ What had stuck in my mind from previous readings of ‘Some Other, Better Otto’ was its central set piece, a fraught family Thanksgiving. I hadn’t previously read it, however, as an investigation – glimpsed amid glittering, razor-sharp jokes that distract and deflect – of the wound of internalised homophobia. As he braces himself for the dreaded celebration, we come to understand that the vulnerable, cynical Otto has learned a sense of unworthiness in which the microaggressions of his family, unintended through they may be, have played a part. Deeply insecure about his deserving of love, he spends much of this story trying to drive away his almost saintly partner: “Why had lovely William stayed with disagreeable old him for all this time?” Eisenberg gives Otto a counterweight, another satellite sibling trying to avoid the rest of the family: his sister Sharon, a brilliant scientist with mental health issues (an early line that made me bark with laughter – when she supplies a swift and confident answer to a question he considers abstruse, Otto is moved to question expertise: “Strange, you really couldn’t tell, half the time, whether someone was knowledgeable or insane” – becomes poignant as Sharon’s story is revealed). You can’t pick your relatives, as they say, but you can choose how you deal with them and you can construct a new kind of family – lovers, allies, those others with whom you have shared experiences, and fears, and injuries.

First published in The Yale Review, January 2003, and available to read here; Collected in Twilight of the Superheroes, Picador, 2006

‘Days,’ Deborah Eisenberg

According to an interview she gave with The Paris Review, this is Deborah Eisenberg’s first short story. This is maddening, incomprehensible. How is it that she arrived at this voice, which feels so accomplished, so idiosyncratic, so deft? She has obviously gone on to write a great number of short stories — her Collected Stories is a veritable doorstopper — and there are so many I love, but it’s ‘Days’ to which I most regularly return. The plot is about as straightforward as it gets: A woman who has given up smoking takes up running at the local Y. Surely this can’t be enough to generate nearly forty pages, you’d think, and you’d be wrong. There are so many lines I want to quote — including a hilarious misunderstanding in which the narrator mistakes Adidas for an airline — but I think maybe I’ll just share the opening two sentences here and encourage you to seek out the rest:

“I had never known what I was like until I stopped smoking, by which time there was hell to pay for it. When the haze cleared over the charred landscape, the person I had always assumed to be behind the smoke was revealed to be a tinny weights-and-balances apparatus, rapidly disassembling on contact with oxygen.”

First published in Eisenberg’s collection Transactions in a Foreign Currency,Knopf, 1986, and collected in The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg, Picador, 2008

‘Rafe’s Coat’ by Deborah Eisenberg

Deborah Eisenberg has far too much fun writing short stories. I don’t mean that peevishly—it’s just that her investment on the paragraph and structure levels is admirable, and that her short stories are such comedies! They’re full of idiosyncratic sad people who treat each other carelessly but love each other very much. The gut punch in Eisenberg’s stories always lands reliably, and oh, what a comfort that is. Take ‘Rafe’s Coat’ for instance, a story for which I have much affection—it starts with the divorce proceedings of our narrator who is a close friend of Rafe’s, and includes long expositions on the intricate plot-twists of ‘This Brief Candle’, a fictitious show in which Rafe’s girlfriend stars. It’s a magnificent story. It’s a hell of a ride.

First published in Transactions in a Foreign Currency, Penguin, 1986. Collected in The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg, Picador, 2010

‘Your Duck Is My Duck’ by Deborah Eisenberg

I’m still more than a little surprised that every short story-reading human I meet doesn’t greet me by grabbing my shoulders and demanding that we talk right now about Deborah Eisenberg’s ‘Your Duck Is My Duck’. This is the sort of story whose omission from, well, anywhere at all ought to mean an early and well-earned retirement for the editors in question. I myself missed it when it appeared in Fence: thank heaven for them, for the O. Henry anthology, and for Lauren Groff in championing this story of the rich and poor, artists and patrons, painters and puppeteers.

As that list suggests: one of the greatest challenges in writing fiction with anything to say about right-the-hell-now is getting everybody in the same room. Your Duck not only manages this, but, unblinking, shows how little doing so might matter, how much deeper we’re in it than we imagine, how very late is the hour.

When our narrator, a struggling painter, tries to return some dresses given by her very rich hostess, we get this: “‘The dresses?’ she said. She smiled vaguely, and patted me, as though I had barked.”

There’s so much in this story—every twist and turn is a necessary point on the map of itself. Any account of it would just devolve into endless quotation until the whole story would be typed out below. I won’t do that to you—if you promise to seek the story out yourselves.

In Your Duck Is My Duck, Ecco, 2018, and available through Electric Literature here

‘Recalculating’ by Deborah Eisenberg

Eisenberg’s one of the authors I discovered in the 80s, during that short story moment I mentioned earlier. This newish story is one I’d never read before — but will never forget. Her work gets under your skin. Like all the best writing, what it seems to be about is the iceberg’s tip. Yes, it’s about family, about love, about secrets. But really it’s about all of life in a life. It’s haunting and I predict I’ll read it several more times.

Published in The New York Review of Books in 2011, and available to read here