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Jonathan Dee’s essay on Deborah Eisenberg in the new Harper’s reminds me of why I haven’t entirely given up on lit crit in our nation’s glossy mags. It’s not online, so no link, but find a newsstand and cough up the seven bucks (just look at it as two less lattes from Starbucks this week (actually, better yet, just get a yearly subscription for 18 bucks and change)).
A taste:
Eisenberg rejects this knowingness, this access to any intelligence that operates over and above that of her characters. For her, the path to understanding is through a deeper and more seamless commitment to the rendering of one character’s state of mind. Her expansiveness is not a matter of multiplying perspectives (there are, by my count, a total of three stories in her oeuvre in which a second point of view briefly appears) but of honoring subjectivity, doing full justice to the limited vision of one person in one vital situation.
And:
A separation of the author’s intelligence from the character’s consciousness would be implied by certain reader-friendly indulgences at a story’s outset, and those are indulgences Eisenberg declines to make. No concession is made, in other words, to the idea that some theoretical someone is being narrated to: the story’s voice is its voice, and if you are patient you will latch on to it.
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Dee’s article is an example of the kind of real criticism that puts Batuman’s n + 1 article about the death of the short story to shame. It gives some context, both for Eisenberg and her latest work, Twilight of the Superheroes; develops a nuanced position on Twilight; and supports that position with extensive evidence. It naturally won’t get as much attention as the asinine n + 1 article–or, for that matter, the NYT top 25 novels crap–because it doesn’t offer any sweeping statements or inflammatory pronouncements. But, I guess, we should at least be thankful that something like this is published in a major “culture” magazine. Kudos to Harper’s.
I haven’t read any Eisenberg, but Dee makes me want to. She seems to share a lot of qualities with Stephen Dixon: “One of the great pleasures of Eisenberg’s work is the violence it does to the old chestnut that a short story’s artfulness is best measured by how much is left out; on the contrary, what impresses about her stories is all that she dares to throw into them. They are as unafraid of digression as most novels, which makes them seem–relative to other stories especially–orgainic, spontaneous, unconstructed: in a word, lifelike.” Dixon’s been throwing all kinds of likelikeness into his stories for the past 30 or so years. Eisenberg seems to be a less colloquial writer than Dixon, but I wonder how close the two are in their approach. Guess I’ll have to read Eisenberg!