Freaks Like Us

These tales about terminally ironic, dysfunctional people offer moments of startling insight.

TWILIGHT OF THE SUPERHEROES

Stories

By Deborah Eisenberg

Farrar Straus Giroux. 225 pp. $23

When critics want to praise a short story writer, they like to trot out Chekhov. As an adjective, the overused "Chekhovian" often means little more than "good," although it does bestow a certain gravitas, a whiff of Russian soulfulness. The Canadian writer Alice Munro gets wrapped in the master's cloak most often. But one could more sensibly argue for Deborah Eisenberg, who beat Munro to the venerable Rea Award for the Short Story by a year. Eisenberg's seventh collection of stories, Twilight of the Superheroes , confirms her talent for fiction that, like Chekhov's, insinuates you right into the characters' gnarled hearts, by methods so subtle and slippery that you're not sure where you are or how you got there.

The quintessential Eisenberg protagonist is terminally ironic and certainly "difficult," as friends and relations will jump to attest. Her families are not usually strictly nuclear: There are second and third marriages, gay couples adopting babies, complicated custody arrangements, the stray cradle-robber. Many of the characters confront encroaching middle age with consternation, their possibilities reduced before they were even fully aware they'd made choices ("How has he gotten so old?"). But other characters are quite young, and it's the clash between the kids' and the grown-ups' sensibilities -- cynicism and hope, world-weariness and naiveté -- that gives this collection its bite and ballast.

In the title story, Lucien, a widowed Manhattan gallery owner still in mourning, finds a spectacular sublet for his Midwestern nephew, Nathaniel, and Nathaniel's friends. It would be a fairy-tale real-estate story if the loft didn't have a perfect view of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. The twentysomething roommates need almost four years to recover. "For a long time now they've been able to hang out here on the terrace without anyone running inside to be sick or bursting into tears or diving under something at a loud noise or even just making macabre jokes or wondering what sort of debris is settling into their drinks." But as things return to normal, the loft's owner returns to New York, and Lucien has the unpleasant job of ousting the aimless pals. Where they're going, either literally or figuratively, remains unclear. The story, like the loft's terrace, seems suspended in space and time.

When Kristina, the timid young waitress in "Window," flees the shadowy gun dealer who has deposited her at an isolated cabin in the woods to care for his infant son, she muses, "Chicago, Maine, Seattle, Atlanta -- or why not go to one of those places really far away, where people spoke languages she couldn't understand at all? Because that was the point -- this direction or that -- apparently it didn't matter where she went." Wherever she finds herself, she'll be stuck with her own confusion, and Eisenberg gives us a crystal-clear view of her character's fogginess.

Sanity -- the thin line between having it and losing it -- is a recurrent theme. Many of these characters fall somewhere between neurotic and downright dysfunctional. In "Some Other, Better Otto," an irascible lawyer must mediate among his good-natured lover, William; his "normal" sister, Corinne; and his brilliant, unstable sister, Sharon. Sharon shuns the family Thanksgiving dinner ("I know it can be hard for her to be with people," Corinne sniffs, "but we're not people -- we're family") and narrowly misses being institutionalized when a security guard mistakes her for a deranged street person.

The diplomat's wife in "The Flaw in the Design" silently worries as her son's political rants become more and more bizarre. Distant from her husband and at a loss to help her son, she embarks on an affair for little purpose other than distraction. "I wanted a life very much like the one I'd grown up with, a life like my parents' -- a cozy old house on a sloping lawn, magnolias and lilacs, the sun like a benign monarch, the fragrance of a mown lawn, the pear tree a gentle torch against the blue fall sky, sleds and the children's bicycles out front, no more than that, a music box life, the chiming days."

But maybe only from outside does anyone's life seem uncomplicated or purely happy. Eisenberg favors sudden point-of-view shifts that force us to see a situation in an entirely new way. In "Like It Or Not," Kate, a divorced high school biology teacher on vacation in Italy, finds herself in the company of a debonair count. It's the kind of charmed story that, in the movies, would lead to romance (cue the swelling violins). Instead, we leave Kate's perceptions mid-story and land in the count's brain -- to discover that he lusts after not Kate but a teenage girl. The shift (and the surprise) is dizzying.

In life, we sink under the weight of our own limited brains. But as readers -- at least of fiction as wry and crisp as Eisenberg's -- we can escape. As one character says about looking at a painting, "It can be like a door swinging open, a sensation, however brief, of vaulting freedom. It's as if, for a moment, you were a different person, with different eyes and different capacities and a different history -- a sensation, really, that's a lot like hope." ?

Lisa Zeidner's last novel was "Layover." She is a professor at Rutgers University.