I picked up Deborah Eisenberg’s collection of short stories, Twilight of the Superheroes, a few months back. I was actively trying to work more female writers into my life, and I read an article - somewhere - touting Deborah Eisenberg and Alice Munro as the modern masters of the short story. I’ve bought both, but I’ll confess to reading the Eisenberg collection first after falling in love with the cover. I’m that shallow.
It also didn’t hurt, as Michael Schaub at Bookslut pointed out, that the book “has been getting better reviews than, let’s say, a hypothetical collaboration between Philip Roth and God.” Schaub’s blurb also mentions that Eisenberg’s companion of more than 30 years is the actor who played Vizzini in The Princess Bride. “Inconceivable!” You’ve got to read it then, right?
The title story is fantastic. I’ve read it twice and will probably read it again periodically. It tells the story of a group of people, and the impact that the 9/11 terrorist attack has on them. What would seeing something like that do to you if you were just out of college and vaguely adrift anyway? What if you were someone who worked in the arts, but had grown disillusioned with art’s direction in the modern world? And what if you had come to this country to escape from a world where men with guns could kick in your door looking for you? There are no physical superheroes in the story - it is not a fantasy or sci-fi tale. The superhero motif is used as a metaphor for some other, greater, time in our own lives and/or in our collective history:
Well, superpowers are probably a feature of youth, like Wendy’s ability to fly around with that creepy Peter Pan. Or maybe they belonged to a loftier period of history.
The fading superheroes are the dreams of younger versions of ourselves (we’re no spring chickens) and the greater days of our society and our country. I listened in to KCRW’s Bookworm interview with Eisenberg yesterday, and he gets much, much deeper into the symbolism and meaning of these stories. Check it out if you’re interested in what it’s all about (they also have an excerpt if you want to take the stories for a test drive).
The collection is unified by a mood throughout the book. Angst and ennui are on every page. If you like your short stories upbeat or neatly resolved with a traditional narrative arc, these stories are not for you. These short stories are also relatively long but not quite novella length. I highly recommend this collection if you are up for being challenged and a little depressed. You may want to hold off until after the holidays. If you are prone to winter-time depression generally, you may want to hold off and use the book to take some of the luster off of spring.