Twilight of the Superheroes

Just finished Twilight of the Superheroes. I feel as I almost always feel after reading a collection of short stories – a bit confused, definitely intrigued, and compelled to go back and look some of the stories over again. I can never really digest everything that’s going on in a short story collection on the first read-through. Some of these stories I don’t think I liked very much. Some of them I think I liked quite a lot. But I’m not entirely sure yet.

I went back and read some of the glowing reviews for the book that came out last year; I know it’s hard to actually think for yourself about something like this once you’ve sullied your mind with other people’s opinions, but sometimes I need that to get a better focus on what I’ve just read. Several reviews (most notably Entertainment Weekly’s and Salon’s) point out fundamental weaknesses in the title story, and I’m tempted to side with them, because out of all the stories, “Twilight of the Superheroes” is the one that hangs the least neatly in my memory. Too many characters, too clear a confrontation with 9/11, perhaps … It seems obvious to me that something as huge and horrible and unfathomable as 9/11 is most properly evoked by insinuation, a tactic which allows the hugeness and horribleness and unfathomableness to grow to the specific dimensions that each reader’s mind has allotted for it. And Eisenberg does insinuation incredibly well. It’s perhaps at its best in “Revenge of the Dinosaurs,” where Nana sits silently on the couch in front of a muted television showing the carnage in (presumably) Iraq, and the willfully self-deluded narrator throws out perfectly-pitched, random soundbites like the following:

… Last week when I’d called my old friend Juliette and said I was coming to the city to see Nana, she said sure I could stay at her place and naturally I assumed I’d be hanging out there a bit when I got in from the airport and we’d catch up and so on. But when I arrived, some guy, Juliette’s newish boyfriend, evidently – Wendall, I think his name might be – whom she’d sort of mentioned on the phone, turned out to be there, too. Sure, let’s just kill them, why not just kill them all, he was shouting. Juliette was peeling an orange. I’m not saying kill extra people, she said. I’m just frightened; there are a lot of crazy, angry maniacs out there who want to kill us, and I’m frightened. You’re frightened, he yelled. No one else in the world is frightened? Juliette raised her eyebrows at me and shrugged. The orange smelled fantastic. I was completely dehydrated from the flight because they hardly even bring you water anymore, though when I was little it was all so fun and special, with the pretty stewardesses and trays of little wrapped things, and I was just dying to tear open Juliette’s fridge and see if there was another orange in there …

In moments like this, Eisenberg shows us how we have all become so acclimated to the new culture of fear and terror and anti-terror that when the important questions are actually raised, the ones that we have to confront before we can figure out how to survive in this cowardly new world we’re living in, they sound to us like nothing more than background chatter or idle futility; they are easily drowned out by superficial bodily needs or created distractions.

In the same way, the narrator in “The Flaw in the Design” allows the supreme distraction of sexual gratification to take precedence over her slowly disintegrating family life, spurred by the increasingly severe bouts of depression taking over her son’s mind. Bouts of depression that seem, pointedly, politically driven. It’s no accident that the story takes place in Washington, D.C. The narrator even hints that Oliver’s mental problems may stem from his youthful experiences as the child of an American diplomat in these xenophobic millennial years; “Oliver spent his early childhood in places where there was a certain amount of hostility towards us – not us personally, of course, but toward our culture, I suppose, as it was perceived.”

Writing all of this has made me decide that I really did love many of the moments woven into this book. It’s worth another read through, at some point. Perhaps I enjoy it most for its affirmation that literature about the post-9/11 American landscape doesn’t have to be so self-consciously post-post-modern all the time.