Ruven Afanador for The New York Times

Over three decades of short fiction, the writer has managed to capture, with hilarious tenderness, the dysfunction of daily life in this country.

It takes Deborah Eisenberg about a year to write a short story. She works at a desk overlooking the gently curving stairwell in her spacious, light-soaked Chelsea apartment. A small painting of a brick wall, suspended from the high ceiling by two slender cables, hangs at eye level in front of the desk, a sardonic reminder of the nature of her task. For Eisenberg, coming up against a brick wall is what writing often feels like. At 72, she has been conducting her siege on the ineffable for more than four decades, and yet the creative process remains almost totally opaque to her. “You work and you work and you work and you work,” she told me recently, her delicate, quavering voice an audible testament to the endless hours of labor. “And for months or years on end, you’re just a total dray horse, and then you finally finish something, and the next day you look at it and you think, How did that get there? What is that? Why were those the things that I seemed to need to say?”

Behind her desk is a wrought-iron daybed on which she takes frequent breaks to read; while she’s in the early stages of working on a new story, two hours of writing a day is usually as much as she can manage. When I asked her what she does with the rest of her time, a puzzled look came across her face, as though she were trying to decipher some hidden message in the ceiling moldings. “It’s hard to say,” she eventually conceded. For the past 40 years she has lived with the playwright and actor Wallace Shawn, whom Eisenberg refers to as “my boyfriend” and “my sweetheart.” (They have never married.) “I don’t like to cook, and I’m not a good cook, but I like to keep Wally fed,” she added. I waited a moment longer to see if she would say anything else. Then I changed the subject.

In spite of her desultory M.O., Eisenberg has somehow managed to produce one of the most original and accomplished bodies of work in contemporary literature. With the exception of a play, a book about the painter Jennifer Bartlett and a handful of critical essays, her output consists entirely of short stories, and yet as a portraitist and interpreter of the moral and political chaos of American life she is the equal of any novelist of the past 30 years. Her stories rove from the Midwest, where she was born, to the metropolitan centers and foreign outposts of American power and concern the fate of artists and intellectuals, bankers, movie stars and C.I.A. apparatchiks, as well as drifters, dropouts and dead-enders, the politically displaced and the existentially homeless. Like their creator, her dramatis personae are beings of an almost extraterrestrial sensitivity and confusion; they look at the world with a kind of radical naïveté, as though they had never before encountered cars, buildings, trees or clouds, let alone the ambiguous workings of human social life. Just how strange it is to be that lost and lonely creature, oneself, is a realization that Eisenberg’s world-dazed men and women arrive at time and again.

Naturally, Eisenberg is a master of the requisite short-story skill set: observation, pacing, surprise and economy. (Consider the hyperefficient characterization that occurs in these two short sentences: “Caroline had never cared what things were really like. He’d once heard her say thank you to a recorded message.”) At the same time, she has always been thrillingly heedless of the rules by which so many contemporary practitioners seem bound. “The confines of the short story never confine her,” Lorrie Moore told me in an email. Her work bristles with dreams, memory tangents, cognitive non sequiturs — the rough edges of life that most writers are eager to smooth away in their pursuit of formal elegance. “How else, except in the clarity of dreams, are you supposed to see the world all around you that’s hidden by the light of day?” one character asks, succinctly formulating one of the metaphysical paradoxes that underwrites all of Eisenberg’s work.

In person, Eisenberg can also be hard to anticipate, her conversational manner shifting between assertive lucidity and groggy self-deprecation. “I go through my life in a fog, not understanding anything, so anything I tell you is questionable,” she warned me. Eisenberg and Shawn live in a narrow beige rowhouse with a black cornice and a lightly peeling facade, which give the place, its exorbitant property value notwithstanding, an air of mild bohemian dilapidation. From the roof deck, its potted hydrangeas and wisteria bursting with rude health, you can see the High Line, the disused stretch of elevated railroad spur that was converted into a public park in 2009. “It looks like a metaphor, like a morality play: all of humanity marching in one direction,” Eisenberg told me as we took in the view one sweltering July afternoon. She and Shawn sometimes walk there in the evenings. “The lighting is beautiful, the vegetation is beautiful,” Eisenberg continued. “People are lying around basically having sex — just doing whatever they want. It’s really nice.”

With her intense pallor, hectic gray hair and deep-set brown eyes, Eisenberg looks a bit like a figure from a lost Tim Burton film. Each time we met, she wore black jeans and a black boat-neck shirt that hung loosely from her diminutive frame. She is slender, petite, brittle-looking; walking around Midtown with her a few days later, I kept worrying that she was about to be knocked over and trampled by the onrushing crowds. This feeling may have stemmed in part from an immersion in Eisenberg’s work, which is suffused with a sense of the brittleness, not just of bodies but also of communities and nations, even reality itself. In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, one character in “Twilight of the Superheroes,” the title story from her fourth collection, comes to think of reality as “a curtain painted with the map of the earth, its oceans and continents, with Lucien’s delightful city,” through which the planes tore a hole, exposing the dark world behind it.

A story a year translates to roughly a book a decade, and this month marks the publication of “Your Duck Is My Duck,” Eisenberg’s first collection in 12 years and her fifth in total. As a record of what American life feels like right now, of the effects of the current American insanity on the central nervous system, it is unlikely to be bettered this year. Eisenberg is especially shrewd about the way in which emotions are dictated from above and public events spread like a stain through our private lives. In the magisterial title story, a struggling middle-aged artist with chronic insomnia visits her doctor. The doctor suggests pills. “I’m afraid they’ll blunt my affect,” the artist says. Irritated, the doctor replies that in that case her best bet is to figure out why she isn’t sleeping. “What’s to figure out?” the artist says. “I’m hurtling through time, strapped to an explosive device, my life. Plus, it’s beginning to look like a photo finish — me first, or the world. It’s not so hard to figure out why I’m not sleeping. What I can’t figure out is why everybody else is sleeping.” (“Everybody else is sleeping because everybody else is taking pills,” the doctor says.)

The story, one of Eisenberg’s finest to date, is a fugue of misunderstanding. After the narrator’s ex-husband sells one of her paintings to a volatile couple with money to burn, they invite her to stay with them in their holiday home in an unidentified foreign country. There she meets a reclusive puppeteer, another guest, who is developing his next show, a political allegory about an insurrection of serfs, bats and donkeys against a corrupt king and queen. (Working title: “State of Emergency.”) One night, still struggling with insomnia, the narrator accepts a few sleeping pills from her hostess. The next morning she wakes up “not exactly refreshed, more sort of blank really, as if the night had been not just dreamless but expunged.” She is excited to see she has an email from her ex-husband, whom she has been missing acutely. The email, however, appears to be gibberish: “Prisoner? The world is large. You’re only a prisoner of your own fears. If you don’t like it in the prison of your fears, go somewhere else.” After a moment of concern for his mental health, the narrator realizes, to her horror, that the email is a response to a message she sent the previous night, under the influence of the sleeping medication, a garbled précis of “State of Emergency” that doubles as an account of her desperate life situation: “Your support for their corrupt regime has cost you more than it has cost me! Yes I am a prisoner now, but your soul has turned to dust, these are the facts.” Then she finishes reading his response, in which he tells her that the new life he tried to start in Europe has not been going as planned: “Maybe I’ll come back to the States just to regroup for a bit, though god knows it’s finished there, isn’t it — really, truly finished.”

The story doesn’t dwell on this remark, but in its offhand way, it serves as a kind of thesis statement for the book — or, indeed, for Eisenberg’s work as a whole, which has traced the arc of America’s descent into a politics of tribalism and demagogy with alarming clearsightedness. “I just fall over guffawing when people say, ‘This isn’t who we are,’ ” she said of Trump’s policies in a tone of weary clarity, settling herself on the daybed. “Who are you other than what you do?”

Eisenberg was born in Winnetka, a Chicago suburb, in 1945, the daughter of second-generation Jewish immigrants; her grandparents fled czarist Russia and what is now Ukraine to escape the wave of pogroms that swept the empire at the turn of the century and the prospect of military conscription. Her father was a saintly if remote pediatrician who worked relentlessly. Her mother, a forceful and intelligent woman with no outlet for her talents beyond housework and child rearing, displaced her suspended ambition onto Eisenberg and her older brother. Success and achievement were highly prized; Eisenberg responded by performing poorly in school and vowing never to make anything of her life. Her relationship with her mother was a hothouse of flowering tensions and resentments. At age 12, Eisenberg came down with scoliosis and for several years had to wear a full-body brace 24 hours a day. By the time she turned 17, she could no longer stand it. “I will not live one day longer in this!” she says she announced. “It’s this or into the river with me!” Her cousins once suggested to Eisenberg that the brace was just a way for her mother to torture her.

Eisenberg was disabused of any city-on-a-hill mythology when she was still a teenager. In 1963, the year of the Birmingham campaign and George Wallace’s stand in the schoolhouse door, she heard from a school friend about a racially integrated social-justice summer camp near the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. It was a perfect opportunity to put some distance between herself and her mother, who seemed only too happy to let Eisenberg go. One night, the campsite was raided by local police officers. At first, Eisenberg recalled, the officers joked about shooting the camp leaders along with their young wards right there. Instead, they tried to make a legal example of them. Eisenberg was charged with “lewd behavior” — that is, interracial sex (“I can assure you I was having sex with no one,” she clarified) — and, after spending the night in jail, was sequestered for several days in the basement of a local church. Thanks to the efforts of a courageous local lawyer, Eisenberg and her fellow campers were released. The case eventually fell apart.

The greatest shock, however, came after she returned home. “No one said, ‘You’re lying!’ ” she explained. “It was just sort of: ‘Oh ha-ha, dear, of course! You’re a teenage hysteric!’ That was the subtext. And I was a teenage hysteric, but I knew what was happening.” The realization that, as she put it, “it’s very, very, very difficult for people, particularly people with a certain level of comfort or privilege, to take in the reality of a situation” was, in a sense, all she needed; artistically, she has been living off the interest of this insight ever since.

As a young woman, Eisenberg’s commitment to underachievement was ironclad. After two years at Marlboro College, in Vermont, she dropped out and hitchhiked around the country with a boyfriend, whom she described as a “hippie prince.” Eventually she found her way to New York (minus the boyfriend, who had absconded to Canada to avoid military service), where she completed her undergraduate degree at the New School and embarked on more than a decade of waitressing and secretarial jobs, including a stint at The New York Review of Books.

In the early 1970s, Eisenberg was introduced to Shawn, an up-and-coming playwright whose father, William, was the famously reticent editor of The New Yorker. At first it seemed as though they had little in common. Eisenberg had embraced the counterculture of the ’60s, marching against the Vietnam War, experimenting with drugs and in general living a life of high-minded dissipation; Shawn was a liberal centrist who had revered President Kennedy and still wore the same kind of Brooks Brothers jackets his mother dressed him in as a child. “She didn’t hang with people who believed in the American system, who believed that America was basically a benevolent power in the world,” Shawn told me. “I don’t think she really hung with anybody who even knew people like that.” Nevertheless, a bond was quickly formed. “It’s an interesting feature of human life that one shrinks and expands according to whom one is talking to,” Eisenberg said. “Talking to Wally, I discovered in myself large reserves of mental and emotional activity that had simply been unavailable to me before.” Shawn, who was still living with his parents on the Upper East Side, began staying at Eisenberg’s apartment on Leroy Street in the West Village, though they had no plans for a long-term future together. “We were very careful about not buying a large tube of toothpaste,” Eisenberg told me. Shawn added, “If someone had said at that time, ‘You’re still gonna be living together when you’re in your 70s,’ it would have seemed like a joke.”


Eisenberg and Shawn in New York in the 1970s. From Deborah Eisenberg

By the time she turned 30, Eisenberg was smoking three packs of Gauloises a day; prompted in part by the fact that Shawn is asthmatic, she resolved to stop and began working out at the 23rd Street Y. The experience of quitting was physically and emotionally ravaging. Seeing what a hard time she was having, Shawn suggested she write about it. Over the course of three years, Eisenberg produced several drafts of what would become “Days,” her first short story, each of which Shawn responded to with constructive notes. “She had to overcome a mountainous obstacle,” Shawn told me. “Her plan to do nothing.” Eisenberg claims she would never have become a writer had it not been for Shawn’s encouragement; Shawn, a fierce champion of her work and talent, finds this hard to believe. No magazine would publish “Days,” but it finally appeared in her first collection, “Transactions in a Foreign Currency,” in 1986. Eisenberg was so nervous about the book’s publication that she left the country and holed up in a Venetian hotel for three months. Shawn attended the celebratory lunch in her stead and passed on news of the book’s (modest but mostly favorable) reception.

“Transactions in a Foreign Currency” appeared at a moment when minimalism, with its verbal and emotional austerity, was the dominant mode in American fiction. Eisenberg’s work could not have gone more against the grain. While her contemporaries sought a scaled-down perfection, she produced stories of amplitude and ambition, form-breaking narratives that swung thrillingly between the domestic and the political, the mundane and the visionary. George Saunders wrote to me that what he loves about her work is the feeling that “her narratives could go anywhere, which, given the country and time in which we live, is important.”

Eisenberg is intensely, if somewhat narrowly, revered, a darling of critics and other practitioners, but not much known beyond the literary world. Still, the label “writer’s writer,” with its connotations of mere technical prowess, doesn’t fit. Like Saul Bellow or Cynthia Ozick, she is an American writer with a Russian soul, an artist of moral and intellectual fervor, driven by a desire to make windows into people’s souls. She sees her characters under the aspect of both history and eternity, fixing the essence of a life with remorseless precision. In “Someone to Talk To,” from her third collection, “All Around Atlantis” (1997), a gifted American pianist, coming to the understanding that he is simply not gifted enough to sustain the concert career he had dreamed of as a young man, makes a devil’s bargain with a corrupt foreign regime. Eisenberg can be a writer of severe judgment, but it is with the utmost tenderness that she renders this broken man’s acceptance of the reality that, “like most humans,” he

was an experiment that had never been expected to succeed, a little padding around some evolutionary thrust, a scattershot nubbin of DNA. It was a matter of huge biological importance, for some reason, that he be desperate to meet the demands of his life, but it was a matter of no biological importance whatever that he be able to meet them.

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Note those three sad, seemingly throwaway words, “for some reason,” into which a whole lifetime of fumbling aspiration and baffled regret have been compressed.

For years, Eisenberg and Shawn had been talking about the nature of American society. Eisenberg had little patience for a nation that dropped seven million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia (more than three times the total amount dropped by the United States during World War II) talking about itself and its mission in the world in elevated moral terms. Shawn, by contrast, held to the liberal view of his country as a benign if sometimes tragically blundering power. The more time he spent with Eisenberg, however, the harder it became for him to maintain his belief in the American system.

As the 1980s wore on, both of them became increasingly appalled by their government’s actions in Central America, where the Reagan administration, ostensibly fearful of Soviet encroachment in America’s backyard, was violently subverting the socialist revolution in Nicaragua and propping up the repressive right-wing client states of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. To get a better sense, as they put it, of where their tax dollars were going, Eisenberg and Shawn took a series of trips to the region, where they met with journalists, activists, politicians and ordinary civilians, who were experiencing the effects of American policy firsthand. In El Salvador, where American-trained death squads were roaming the countryside in search of leftist guerrillas and in some cases massacring entire villages, they saw spray-painted on the side of the United States Embassy the words: “In this building is planned the murder and torture of the Salvadoran people.” Another time, Eisenberg and Shawn attended a service at the church of Oscar Romero, the former archbishop of San Salvador who spoke out against the government’s campaign of terror against its own people and was murdered by a right-wing assassin while saying Mass in 1980. After the service, a number of congregants stayed to speak to the American couple about life in El Salvador and the dangers they faced on a daily basis. “They were putting their lives in our hands,” Eisenberg said. “We both thought, Well, we have a responsibility now.”

Back in New York, Eisenberg and Shawn had trouble persuading people of the full extent of what they’d seen. “There was no faster way to shut down a dinner party,” she told me. “I was called all the things women are called: naïve, shrill, ignorant.” It was much worse than returning to Winnetka from the South as a teenager, she said, “because then I was coming back into a culture of nice, well-meaning suburbanites. From Central America, I was coming back into a culture of elite, powerful people with vested interests who were close to centers of power.”

Eisenberg had not traveled to the region with the intention of writing about it — she took no notes while she was there — but the experience clearly had a galvanizing effect on her imagination. In “Holy Week,” from her second collection, “Under the 82nd Airborne” (1992), a former banker turned travel writer visits a Guatemala devastated by civil war with his younger girlfriend. His notebook entries about the imperfectly concealed horrors they witness are interspersed with snippets of the breezy article he has been sent there to report. (“Of the many beautiful restaurants in town, perhaps the loveliest is Buen Pastor. Enjoy a cocktail of platonic perfection outside in the moonlit garden.”) The story is a study in the psychology of evasion and rationalization, the narrator doing all he can to assuage his girlfriend’s growing social conscience. “Yes, the lives some people lead are horrifying,” he tells her in an outburst of spectacular bad faith, “but if you accept the idea that it’s better for some people to be fortunate than for no people to be fortunate, then it’s preposterous to make yourself miserable just because you happen to be one of those fortunate people.”

Those with whom Eisenberg first shared the story found it overbearing. “I know! I know! Don’t tell me!” is how she characterized their response. Critics were similarly resistant, and yet the book has outlasted these objections and feels especially prescient at a moment when America’s willful ignorance on every matter from climate change to its own racial history poses a civilizational threat. “I was born at a moment when the world thought, O.K., this is the end of fascism,” she told me. “I mean, it was a bit of a stupid thing to think, obviously, but I never believed that we would be seeing such a resurgence of it, let alone that America would be joining exuberantly in.”

One evening this summer, Eisenberg and Shawn went to see a new production of “Marie and Bruce,” Shawn’s play, written in 1978, about an operatically dysfunctional married couple, at Jack, a performance space in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. Wedged in among the millennials, several of whom turned to steal glances at the author and his girlfriend, they were the oldest audience members by several decades. (They were also pretty much the only ones there without any conspicuous tattoos.) “If only we’d had a crowd like this at the premiere,” Eisenberg said before the performance began, making touching use of the first-person plural. Indeed, the couple seemed the inverse of the one on stage: mutually affirming and compassionate and bracingly preoccupied with matters beyond their own immediate well being. A few days earlier, Eisenberg showed me what she described, half-jokingly, as her shrine to Wally, a shelf in a narrow downstairs office that houses, among other pieces of iconography, a Wallace Shawn action figure still in its packaging, a Rex-the-dinosaur Pez dispenser (Shawn provides the voice for the character in the “Toy Story” movies) and a photo of Shawn in full costume — outsize ears, warty, wrinkled flesh — for his role as Grand Nagus Zek in “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.” The original audience for “Marie and Bruce,” they explained, was older, stuffy and coldly unreceptive to Shawn’s vision of marriage as a Dante-esque ordeal. Tonight, as the lights came up and Marie (Theda Hammel) began unleashing her fire hose of invective against the timorous Bruce (Gordon Landenberger), the house was immediately overcome with laughter.

Eisenberg and Shawn do not have children, and it is tempting to draw a connection between this fact and their pronounced anti-curmudgeonliness: Perhaps those without a direct personal link to the next generation are naturally more interested in the perspective of the young. “Your Duck Is My Duck,” as you would expect of a book by a writer of 70-plus, is full of a sense of impending expiration; several of its aging characters, struck by the realization that very soon no one will remember the things that they remember, have become ardent students of their own pasts, sifting the years for a faithful account of what their lives will have meant. At the same time, it is also a book about the future and a yearning for, as Eisenberg puts it, “what was just about to be the world’s very latest moment,” a phrase that nicely captures the minute-by-minute anticipation with which ordinary life has been imbued.

These countercurrents merge in the collection’s final story, “Recalculating,” another late-career masterpiece. At a memorial service in London, a middle-aged dance instructor named Vivian encounters the nephew of her deceased former lover and later goes to bed with him. In lesser hands, the one-night stand might have been presented as a desperate and pathetic bid to recapture the past. Instead, Eisenberg shows us how Adam, the nephew, is equally drawn to Vivian, who embodies the world of his uncle, a man who escaped the stifling world of his Midwestern childhood, as Adam himself is now trying to do, and made a new life of sexual and artistic freedom abroad.

Vivian, who does not have children and whose early ambitions to become a dancer were never realized, is full of retrospective longing: “There was always the feeling that one would get around to being young again. And that when one was young again, life would resume the course from which it had so shockingly deviated.” But this sense of loss never curdles into resentment at those with more time than her. On the contrary, she recognizes that her young students, for all their vitality, harbor “sorrows that might still be reversed or at least compensated for.” In a shrewd twist, when Vivian and Adam meet again decades later, it is she who feels a twinge of pity for him, with his potbelly and thinning hair.

Eisenberg and Shawn were thrilled by the performance. After it was over, they stayed to praise and congratulate the young cast and continued to enthuse about it as they made their way to a nearby restaurant in the pouring rain. As they were approaching their destination, Eisenberg, who was wearing a black Issey Miyake trench coat she bought two decades ago (and for which she’d received several compliments that evening), stepped over a rain-swollen gutter into the path of an oncoming car. Shawn reached out to pull her back. “That would’ve been ironic,” she said a bit later, as though she were only now processing the incident. “If I’d been run over after watching ‘Marie and Bruce.’ ”

They made it to dinner in one piece. Eisenberg started with a martini (“You never know what you’re going to get with wine”); Shawn, who rarely drinks, had a seltzer. By way of the new collection they got on to the subject of aging. Eisenberg, who was well into one of the fallow periods that have punctuated her creative life, hadn’t written anything for more than a year. She wondered if she would ever finish another story. Who knew what would give out first — her body or the world? Still, for someone strapped to an explosive device, she was in a buoyant mood.

“People always talk about how horrible old age is, but I couldn’t disagree more,” she said, the candlelight glimmering on her inclined face. “I find age is as intense as adolescence. You know you could hurtle off a cliff at any second. And because of that there’s a sense of destiny, of apprehending things, of love that isn’t available — or wasn’t available to me — earlier. You feel: I’ve survived this ordeal, and now I don’t have to worry. I know how my life has worked out. All the anxiety that I put into the hard questions has fallen away. I can take my satisfactions where they are.” She looked down at her plate of clam toast with pancetta. “I can enjoy my supper.”

Giles Harvey is a contributing writer. His last feature for the magazine was a profile of the novelist Alan Hollinghurst.
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 30, 2018, on Page 52 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The Neurosis Artist.

You can read user comments - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/27/magazine/deborah-eisenberg-chronicler-of-american-insanity.html

Typically Jewish she worked her entire life to subvert and attack the Gentile society that accepted her worthless jewish ass into its Nation and this fucking worthless jewish ghoul promoted Jewish Communism everywhere within it. Note these "deep thinking morally superior" kikes which is always the tone of these kind of joke articles never ever or really seriously criticize JEWISH COMMUNISM anywhere in the world. Only America is bad for fighting against Jewish Communism and giving Goyim freedom from Jews. Her great suffering in life was fucking quitting smoking...…. Oy Veh a suffering messiah Goyim...

Communism is the Jewish soul as Rabbi Wise bragged.

HP Mageson666 said:

Her great suffering in life was fucking quitting smoking...…. Oy Veh a suffering messiah Goyim...

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:lol: Reading the lovey-dovey comments on the article makes what you said much more funny.

I want to say a lolocaust joke about gassing out its lungs with chemicals and smoke, but I won't...!