Previous Ninja contributor Birrell initiates new Ninja Lyon by touring the work of admitted influence Deborah Eisenberg. With Twilight of the Superheroes as their guide, Birrell and Lyon discuss Eisenberg’s judicious exclamation marks, when it’s wrong for kids to be cute, and the wonder of prose that evokes “the swoop and deke of pure thought.”

Eisenberg will be appearing at the IFOA this month. Details here.

Heather Birrell: I want to start by saying – by way of introduction and possibly excuse – how huge an influence Deborah Eisenberg has been on my writing, although I always feel odd using that word – influence – because it doesn’t seem to sufficiently describe how her work has affected me. (And I should also reveal that I am in the process of interviewing the author herself – an intimidating and thrilling process.) I suppose when I think “influence” I picture someone peering over my shoulder, benignly yet resolutely offering alternative sentence structures or chiding me for resorting to easy cliché… But when I read Eisenberg’s work, I have a sense of both exhilaration and relief – inspiration by osmosis. Ah, my writer-self thinks, look how she does that, hewing so closely to rhythms of thought, achieving the sort of meaningful and organic structural shape that seems to be missing from so many other contemporary forms… I don’t, as I might with other writers, feel compelled to neurotically dissect the stories, although I might re-read them several times. I guess there is something in the integrity and intelligence of the work which makes me feel freer – buoyed by the authentic – as a writer, and deeply satisfied as a reader. So, it’s really a pleasure for me to be able to discuss her newest offering (eight years since her last – and well worth the wait), Twilight of the Superheroes, with you, a fellow short story writer and Eisenberg fan.

Annabel Lyon: I can’t claim Eisenberg as a formative influence, as I came to her work only relatively recently, but when I read her I have the eerie sensation of knowing we read and love the same writers - Joy Williams comes to mind particularly, also Lorrie Moore - writers who are interested in a particular prose style, deceptively relaxed, that dignifies the reader’s intelligence, inevitably stretches formal boundaries, and makes us laugh not with humour but with joy. I like your phrase ‘the rhythms of thought’. This isn’t David Foster Wallace, prose style as gauntlet thrown down, but something more intimate. It’s the shock of the familiar: catching what’s right there in front of us, images, emotional calibrations, and making us really see. A good example of this is her title story, which opens the collection: four aimless Midwestern twenty-somethings who land happenstance in a fabulous New York loft with a perfect view of the World Trade towers. Even gifted writers seem to struggle with 9-11 stories (I’m thinking of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, for instance, which for me had too jittery a surface ever to achieve emotional depths), but Eisenberg comes as close to pulling it off as anyone can. “There was that unearthly palace, the Chrysler Building! There was the Empire State Building, like a brilliant violet hologram! There were the vast, twinkling prairies of Brooklyn and New Jersey!....Back when Nathaniel moved into Mr. Matsumoto’s loft, shortly after his millenial arrival in New York, sitting out on the terrace had been like looking down over the rim into a gigantic glass of champagne.” I love her exclamation marks that seem to catch the character’s breathless shock at the beauty of the place and parody it at the same time. No, I’m not saying that quite right: her exclamation marks show the character aware of his own breathless shock and aware of his own need to parody, to make irony. I think that’s an important distinction: neither reader nor narrator is put in the position of being smarter or more aware than the characters. So then, when she throws out a paragraph like this -

- you buy it because you buy the voice of the character behind it, his sharpness and smartness and pain and anger and humour too (some funny plastic). The character isn’t just a mouthpiece, though (particularly in the section titled “The Age of Digital Reasoning”) the story peels almost free of character and plot. Maybe I should stop there and let you jump in?

HB: Yes, I agree completely re: the exclamation marks. They’re so difficult to pull off, and Eisenberg manages it both sincerely and artfully! (!) And, yes, the fusing of sensibilities, the fact that there is no obvious hierarchy (reader, narrator, character) is perhaps what allows her to make political points and express outrage that might otherwise seem brash or dogmatic. In this way, her voice reminds me of Grace Paley’s, a voice that consistently, thankfully, refuses to make a secret of where it stands. I agree also that this opening story is one of the most sorrowful and searching (and angry!) post 9-11 tales I’ve read. (I disagree re: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – I thought the voice of that novel, although not always perfectly pitched, successfully approximated the skittering panic and initial stages of grief of a child – albeit a very precocious one – directly affected by the disaster in its almost immediate aftermath. Eisenberg’s characters have the advantage of adulthood and a wedge of time between them and the event.) You know, re-reading this story, I keep coming across moments of pure editorializing that I feel should offend – as in, hey, you can’t do that in a story! – but they don’t, and I think part of the reason they don’t, even when, as you pointed out, they have come unstuck from character and plot, is that she’s managed to put her finger on a very familiar pulse (Mine? My generation’s?) – an overwhelming paralysis at the thought of the state we find ourselves in…. That, and I’m exhilarated by the quality of the prose. Here’s one example:

In general, Eisenberg seems to be a writer who constantly excels at doing what you “shouldn’t” in a story, to great effect. One Eisenbergian feature I love is her dinner table scenes – so many characters, often speaking at cross purposes, and the pleasurable readerly confusion of trying to sort it all out… I’m thinking in particular of the scene in “Some Other, Better Otto”, a Thanksgiving celebration, wherein the protagonist’s niece, Portia, becomes confused – to the point of crying – as to the backstory attached to the holiday.

Poor Portia. But lucky us, for getting to meet her, however briefly, in this little scene. I’ll leave off there, and pass you the Bookninja baton.

AL: Funny that you should pick that particular scene from “Some Other, Better Otto”, which is my favourite story from the collection (certainly the story I think of first when I think of the book). Portia is the one character who gives me the tiniest pause in that story. Obviously her precocity is the point—the parallel to Otto’s brilliant, unstable sister Sharon—a parallel Otto himself is conscious of. But Portia’s very articulate neurosis reminded me of Salinger’s Glass family. Updike, in a review of Franny and Zooey, accused Salinger of loving his characters more than God. Which maybe actually says more about Updike than Salinger; but I think what I’m trying to get at is the way Eisenberg endows her characters with relentless intelligence and wit, that very ability to quip at the dinner table, sometimes seems to privilege humour above realism (listeners, Portia is nine). Eisenberg loves her bright, troubled creatures, and if the fairy dust of that brightness twinkles a little close to cuteness, so be it.

Ironically, the next story, “Like it or Not”, seems a bit of an oddball at first, not quite in the same tone as the rest of the stories, perhaps because it lacks what every other story features: unguarded conversation between people who love each other brilliantly, bitterly, madly, and badly. Kate, vacationing in Italy, spends a day and a night in the presence of “the man whom everyone called Harry”, an antiques dealer. Shades of Henry James, of Edith Wharton: the innocent, slightly dowdy American in the company of the suave, slightly shady European. Of the other tourists they encounter on the road, Harry says,

And later:

But Eisenberg thwarts our expectations, granting Kate a complicated, worldly domestic life, while Harry dreams of an untroubled childhood, his paradise lost (“Only he, only he was enslaved by the memory of the sun on the leaves around the door, the way the fruit tasted in the morning...”). In a final, Jamesian moment, Kate and a contemptuous young American girl doing the tour with her annoying family are pictured briefly as mother and daughter, burdened not with innocence but with experience. It’s a wonderful play on the rich literary tradition of the American abroad, honouring it and subverting it at the same time.

Since we seem to be going through the stories in order, I’ll throw “Window” over to you. I’m interested in your take on it, since it’s the one story in the collection that I had reservations about, reservations I’m still struggling to articulate (partly why I’m happy to let you take over here!). Partly, too, criticizing Eisenberg makes me feel like a fly specking across a custard. But something in that one nags at me, and I wonder if it does you, too.

HB: I think your mild objection to the cuteness factor in the Portia scene is forcing me to articulate something slippery and possibly impossible to explain – and that’s Eisenberg’s particular version of realism (James Wood: “Realism is not a law, but a lenient tutor, for it schools its own truants.”), which seems to me pleasingly elastic. It’s strange – although I feel implicated in her characters’ lives, I’m not sure I ever think of them as real. And that’s not to say I don’t believe in them, or feel for them – in fact, I suspect that I often believe in them in the same wholesale, goofy-serious way I “believe” in a dream… And I think I “read” her work less as stories than essays gorgeously cloaked in fiction. Argh. Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?

I like your reading of “Like It Or Not”. Regarding the “American abroad” theme or sub-genre – don’t know if you’ve read the recent essay by Jonathan Dee in Harper’s concerning Twilight Of The Superheroes, but in it he argues that Eisenberg’s earlier, overtly political travel stories (many set in Central American, see Under the 82nd Airborne and All Around Atlantis) are not as strong as these more recent pieces, pointing out that history has somehow caught up to her sensibility. I’m not sure I agree with Dee, and I appreciate how you’ve placed this particular story in the context of a larger (possibly more satirical?) tradition. Something to think about and re-visit.

Still, I’ll admit to an initial period of bafflement over “Like It Or Not”, partly because I found it easier to accept that “kids say the darndest things!” than to completely buy into some of the subtle barbs of Harry, the art dealer guy – which tells me (and you) something about the people I hang out with, and very little about how to interpret the story. The brazen POV switch really is something (we jump from Kate’s head, briefly into Harry’s, then back into Kate’s) – and I think it works because Harry seems, initially, such a 2-D snob (and nob), and getting to splash around inside his mind, albeit briefly, gave me a fuller sense of his vulnerability. But mostly, what I loved about this story was Kate’s sense of the contours of her life and the inevitability of aging – her ongoing meditation on the events she has precipitated (or have befallen her), sparked by the news that her ex-husband, who left her years ago for another man, is now dying.

Anyway, on to “Window”. I do find this story disturbing, although I suspect not for the same reasons you do. Even though half of the stories in the collection are over 40 pages long, this one felt the most novella-esque to me, and definitely distinctive in tone. Brief, inadequate synopsis: Small town, beautiful Kristina finds herself at her half-sister Alma’s, with a young child, Noah, in tow. It becomes obvious in the course of the story, told in an extended flashback, that she has recently “escaped” a life of violence with a smooth-talking, dangerously persuasive gun-dealer/survivalist named Eli.

Kristina is different from Eisenberg’s other characters in this collection in that her image of herself seems more impressionistic than analytical, more atmospheric than neurotic. For me, there is a sense throughout this story of Kristina’s very surroundings somehow calibrating her mood and pushing her into various (sometimes huge) decisions. The whole thing has the feel of a dream or sinister fairy tale (I was reminded of some of AS Byatt’s darker stories): the dangerously curious naïf who disappears into the forest, apparently spellbound by the handsome/duplicitous woodsman, the intimation that there might be other (female) bodies buried somewhere in his past, the woods as a site of great danger, but also of incredible awakening and transformation. Of course, Eisenberg makes more of “Window” than these archetypal characteristics might suggest. Still, I couldn’t help reading the story as a metaphor for a very long history of male violence against women and children, with Kristina’s “ending” being less happy than provisionally, implausibly safe.

Oh, I am going on, aren’t I? Your turn.

AL: I think we’re maybe close to being on the same page about “Window”. Up close, line by line, you cannot fault it. All the Eisenberg traits are here: the self-aware characters, the wonderful dialogue, the even more wonderful interior moments, like when the couple whose house Kristina shares, who are trying for a baby, tell her she can have her room for free:

I’ve been thinking about what you said about Portia in “Some Other, Better Otto”, about not thinking of the character as real. It’s like wondering what Hamlet ate for breakfast, and I’m (like you, I would guess) of that camp that really doesn’t care. Eisenberg’s not creating characters for us to think of as imaginary friends, or living in the house next door. First and foremost, they’re creations in language. That makes her work sound cold, but it’s quite the opposite - there’s an exhilaration to what she does, the swoop and deke of pure thought (your “essays gorgeously cloaked in fiction”) that feels very warm and human and solid to me.

Now, having said all that:

The thing about “Window”, for me, was what you’re left with when you stand back from it and let it sit in your head for a few days. It’s a fairy tale, for sure, and none the worse for that; there’s something primal and chilling about the innocent taken off to live in the woods, and the corruption that ensues there. (I was inspired to go back and read a Joy Williams story, “Woods”, from Taking Care, about a woman who’s forced to live with her husband in a trailer deep in the woods because there’s no other real estate to be had in the area: “She had almost gotten away but not in time and now leaving wouldn’t save her”. “Window” is also predicated on that idea that physical escape is not really escape at all.) But it’s the implication, at the end that Kristina doesn’t want to escape that’s bothering me. Just in case we weren’t quite sure, it’s underlined that Eli, her arms-dealer / woodsman, is not a good guy (though notice how elliptically, beautifully, it’s done):

Eli turns violent, and Kristina runs, but with the understanding that the running—the inevitable pursuit—is a way of keeping him close to her forever. ‘Didactic’ is too strong a word, but the blacks were a little blacker and the whites a littler whiter in this story, for me, than in the others. The irony of the ending simply felt a little neater than I’m used to in Eisenberg’s world.

The final two stories, “Revenge of the Dinosaurs” and “The Flaw in the Design”, are going to prompt only a lot of enthusiastic tail-thumping from me, so I think I’ll pass things back to you.

HB: Okay, I’m going to rabbit on about “Window” for a while, since I realize that, for me, it has broader implications in the context of the whole collection. I’m somewhat loathe to say this, since it seems to support a fave chant of short story detractors everywhere (The characters are too passive! They don’t do anything!), but I like that Kristina found the wherewithal to do something in this story. Of course, the reason she is able to do something is that she’s the only character in the collection (arguably) who is directly endangered (maybe the source of some of those black blacks and white whites you spoke of). She’s not worrying about how to cope with an ex-husband dying or a schizophrenic sister. Planes going into buildings and governments running roughshod over human rights are outside of her purview. I think that Eisenberg recognizes that there are few moments in life that are essentially “do or die”, but that this is one of them, so that when Kristina leaves, with the child (not her child, technically not her responsibility), it made my heart stand up and cheer. It also came as somewhat of a relief to read about someone facing a relatively clear choice versus an ever-present irresolvable malaise (although, naturally, the clarity is short-lived). (I’m reminded here of how oddly comforting it was to go hiking in northern BC and Alaska, where my constant hum of urbanized, “globalized” human anxiety was concentrated into FEAR OF BEAR.) Because of all these issues, whether or not Kristina really wanted to leave Eli matters less to me than the fact that she did. She did!

Anyway, on to “Revenge Of The Dinosaurs”. Tail-thumping indeed. There’s something very casual and natural about this first-person gem. Lulu has returned to her grandmother’s apartment where she has arranged to meet with her brother (and his family) to hash out the details of Nana’s subsequent care. The format of the story, with its relaxed/judicious punctuation, avoids an affected feel/look on the page and manages to steer clear of distracting opacity. The result is a lovely running-together of Lulu’s memory, musings and the bits of dialogue flying around the room. Little details emerge to pin the story to a very specific time and place (NYC, post 9/11) and snippets of personal history speak volumes re: Lulu’s inclinations and values. Here’s a choice bit:

Her voice is quaint – and wise in a wide-eyed way – isn’t it? Which kind of sounds annoying, which it isn’t. Do you have favourite passages?

AL: Okay, here’s a longish excerpt, but I can’t resist. From “Revenge of the Dinosaurs”:

The final story, “The Flaw in the Design”, has something of the first story to it, that quality of abstraction, almost, that ought to sink the story but doesn’t. Briefly, a woman returns from a tryst in a hotel room in time for dinner with her husband, who is under a legal shadow, and her adult son, one of Eisenberg’s great talkers, who has a nasty wit and a troubled soul. His childhood was spent following his parents around the third world, to which his mother attributes at least some of his current distress: “And it is a fact that Oliver spent his early childhood in places where there was a certain amount of hostility toward us—not us personally, of course, but toward our culture, I suppose, as it was perceived, and it wouldn’t be all that remarkable, I suppose, if his view of his native country had been tarnished before he ever really came to live in it.” The father’s job is never quite specified, and his downfall is rendered with the quickest of brushstrokes: “In any case, eventually there was a certain atmosphere. And there were insinuations in the press and rumors about the company John was working with, and it just wasn’t fun for John anymore.”

I love this story, all the balls kept in the air, all the things that shouldn’t work but do. Cuteness is never an issue; politics are both elusive and fierce; and the reader practically forgets about the mother’s secret until the author masterfully brings it back to end the story. So many disparate elements that just, somehow, fit. It’s a brilliant conclusion to a brilliant book.

HB: Oh man, the last word. I’m not sure I can find one that’s worthy. Complete agreement on this end re: the final story and the book as a whole. I could trot out more superlatives, but I think it’s best to cut the chatter and encourage (nay, urge!) folks to read the book for themselves. It’s been a treat to talk to you again, Annabel – especially with such fantastic fodder for discussion!

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Heather Birrell's collection of short fiction, I know you are but what am I? was published in April 2004 by Coach House Books.  A recipient of Concordia University’s David McKeen award, her stories have appeared in Prism International,  the New Quarterly, Descant, Matrix and She Writes, and she has twice been included in the Journey Prize Anthology.

Annabel Lyon’s first book of fiction, Oxygen (2000), a collection of short stories, was published to wide acclaim. Her collection of three novellas, The Best Thing for You (2004), was shortlisted for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. She is also a frequent contributor to the Vancouver Sun and the Globe and Mail. In addition to creative writing, Annabel Lyon has studied music, philosophy, and law. She lives in Vancouver, where she writes full time.