The short story is a medium defined by its limitations: it's a single-sitting read. But the stories in Deborah Eisenberg's seventh collection, Twilight of the Superheroes , feel as capacious as novels. Her last collection, All Around Atlantis , didn't feel this vast. However, Twilight is Eisenberg's first post-9/11 book. Plenty of novelists have tried to confront September 11, but Eisenberg is, and perhaps always will be, a short story writer and not a novelist. In taking on this topic, she tests the limits of her form.

"Twilight of the Superheroes" relates the events of September 11 in tandem with multiple portraits of American life—an aging Midwestern immigrant couple, a post-college comic-strip artist and architect, an upscale native New Yorker with an art gallery—in an attempt to comprehend the variety of psychological effects of the terrorist attacks. A group of recent college graduates sublet a high-rise loft just across from the World Trade Center , taking uninspiring white-collar jobs to pay the rent. Nathaniel entertains himself by illustrating the adventures of his comic-strip creation, Passivityman, while killing time in a dead-end job. (Eisenberg is almost certainly indebted, for this character, to Benjamin Kunkel's Dwight Wilmerding, of Indecision. ) On the morning of the attack, the friends were enjoying coffee out on their balcony. Much of the story takes place several years after the fact, though each thread of plot returns briefly to the characters' experience of pre-9/11 New York . The city may be a beloved home, a fearsome metropolis, or a fairyland of light, glass, and air. Eisenberg makes use of these differences to sensitize readers to the dizzying discontinuity between pre and post-9/11 New York . After 9/11, it is a city in fear.

"Twilight" dwells on the instantaneous collisions of seemingly disconnected people, facts, and actions. A native New Yorker considers the terrorist attacks:

The planes struck, tearing through the curtain of that blue September morning, exposing the dark world that lay right behind it, of populations ruthlessly exploited, inflamed with hatred, and tired of waiting for change to happen.

The story uses a pastiche of moments both before and after the attacks to depict a city of people afflicted with double vision. The city appears to be "back to normal," but the ruins of the World Trade Center remind everyone of what's behind the curtain.

Eisenberg overreaches herself with this story, however. Her minimalist cross-sectional sketch of New York society is supplemented by descriptions of popular trends and current events summaries that read like newspaper clippings. As a result, the story feels over-stuffed and plotless. Perhaps in an effort to sort through some of the confusion, Eisenberg inserts titles for certain groups of paragraphs—" Reunion ," "Innocence," and "Home," among others. The presence of these headings draws attention to how the material of the story does not fall together naturally. "Twilight" has powerful moments, but the story as a whole seems a collection of effortful miscellany. Considering the unwieldiness of the topic, readers might forgive Eisenberg for fumbling here.

Fortunately, the other five stories in the collection benefit from the ambition that caused the failure of the first. These stories are broad in scope without losing their cohesion. They might have been composed by first writing a novel, then cutting and pasting together select passages, often no longer than four lines. Eisenberg hints at plots more than she unfolds them. The stories are not disorienting, however. Though language is compressed in some places, it is never cramped.

Eisenberg's characters are constantly being overwhelmed by various categories of information: the progress of wars, the psychology of mental breakdown, and the fate of the universe according to physics. Each story attempts to reconcile its particular excess of knowledge to the experience of daily life. The excess of consciousness extends even to the lighting of a cigarette in "Window:" "Her hands shake slightly but manage to activate a match. Flame from sulfur, matter into clouds . . ." Eisenberg favors one theme above others, however: irresponsible economic policies subtly infiltrate the living room on multiple occasions, creating family discord, catalyzing domestic abuse, and dulling consciences to the seriousness of statutory rape.

These five stories use current events as strategic reference points, not focal points, as in "Twilight." Eisenberg does not allow these characters' political awareness to blot out their identities as individuals. "Some Other, Better Otto" and "The Flaw in the Design" are particular triumphs. The first story concerns a homosexual man whose affection for his schizophrenic sister estranges him from his other, more traditionally normal, siblings. The second story depicts a family unsettled by years spent living in third world countries. The mother has a wistful affair while mediating between her business-minded husband and her severely depressed teenage son. These two stories hit the note of spiritual exultation that Eisenberg reaches for in "Twilight."

That experience arises from surprising moments of personal connection. Otto, whose bitterness with regard to his sister has left him emotionally isolated, finds himself correcting the grammar of his partner, William, at the top of his lungs:

"This is unbearable! I've spent the best years of my life with a man who doesn't know how to use the word 'and'!..."

Otto sat down heavily at the kitchen table and began to sob.

How arbitrary it all was, and cruel. This identity, that identity: Otto, William, Portia, Molly, the doctor...

Freed from their own identities in a few sparse moments of transcendence, Eisenberg's characters don't resort to verbal effusions. A commonplace remark is the most that's ever said. But in her hands, that's sufficient. Returning to Otto, who has dozed off at the kitchen table:

Had he fallen asleep? He blinked up at William, whose face, shadowed against the light of the night sky, was as inflected, as ample in mystery as the face of the moon. "It's late, my darling," Otto said. "I'm tired. What are we doing down here?"

It's difficult to say whether this feat might be possible in a short story about September 11. Yet Twilight of the Superheroes does achieve astonishing moments of beauty for a book that confronts so many of the dehumanizing aspects of modern consciousness. "Twilight" and "The Revenge of the Dinosaurs," which suffers from a slight narrowness of scope, are the weak stories of the collection. Even in these, though, a few exemplary lines make the story well worth reading. They can, after all, be read in a single sitting.

 

Emer Vaughn is still looking for her superpower.