WORLDS APART

THE BEST STORIES IN DEBORAH EISENBERG'S NEW COLLECTION ARE BUILT TO LAST

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, October 5, 1997

Page: C1

Section: Books

Much of the emotional weight and delivery of Eisenberg's stories owes a debt to her characters: ``exotics ordinaire,'' as a woman in ``Transactions'' says -- people just two inches weirder than the strange guy next door, or slightly more lunatic than all of us know ourselves to be. She is not afraid to stop in the middle of a complex narrative to show how time free falls, then paralyzes, in the mind of a child; conversely, one story will begin after a mother's funeral, then begin such a slow, retrospective dance through the years preceding it that you forget the woman has died. In this manner Eisenberg's stories are deceptively tough: built to last, rather than mere gauzy or ephemeral glimpses of a moment.

But the seven stories in ``All Around Atlantis'' are uneven. Three of them -- ``Rosie Gets a Soul,'' ``Mermaids,'' and the title story -- are as good as anything Eisenberg has done, while the ones set in Central America suffer from a pedantic overkill on the displaced-imperialist theme. I was surprised by the weaker stories; Eisenberg's plots have always traveled widely, and certainly she knows her way around a sun-drenched mercado or a guerrilla-laden mountain path. But here her norteamericanos have gone guiltily back to fascist regimes, where creepy, Robert-Stone wannabes take advantage of the ``convenient innocence'' of the stories' protagonists. This is particularly true in ``Across the Lake,'' in which a naive kid finds himself beyond the last outpost of his old American insularity. ``Tlaloc's Paradise,'' wherein an older expatriated American woman attempts a transient intimacy with a young stranger, is all about longing and dislocation, but its themes are lost in a tangle of irritating nuance and enigma. ``Someone to Talk To,'' which follows an unexceptional pianist to his politically-laden concert in a military dictatorship, fares somewhat better, but the story is too detached from the heart of its narrative -- I felt I was reading a workshop exercise by someone who loved Graham Greene, without being anything like Graham Greene. This is an odd and unexpected failing: Eisenberg generally keeps her own counsel, and that literary autonomy is part of her strength.

``Rosie Gets a Soul,'' on the other hand, belongs to no one but Eisenberg -- and to Rosie, of course, whose milk-pale fragility will either save her or kill her. Nearly alone in the world, trying to walk away from a nasty heroin habit, she finds a challenge awaiting her that seems nearly insurmountable: the ordinary instances of life, with all its simple disappointments and measureless days. The story is one of exquisite memory and perception; what redeems it is not the pathos of Rosie's struggle, but her half-broken, lyrical comprehension of her troubles and her place within them.

It may be even harder to remember and inhabit the mind of a child -- or to do so with the intelligence and range of an adult, without being patronizing -- and so ``Mermaids,'' told from the perspective of a preadolescent girl, seems particularly resonant. Trapped in the agonizing circuitry of a child without much power, living through the infinity of boredom, Kyla is on spring vacation in New York City with a friend she half-hates. Witness to the savage pleasures of adulthood, she is the innocent foil through whom we see the world. That means everything in the story takes on an extrasensory possibility, whether it's the taste of ice cream or one's first glimpse of the world's betrayals.

The title story of ``All Across Atlantis'' follows this arc of youth and memory as it looks backward on a woman's childhood as the daughter of a Hungarian Jew who survived the camps. Anna is grown now, her mother dead; the story is a long soliloquy, addressed to a Hungarian scholar who knew her family when she was a girl. Eisenberg begins all her stories with the abrupt report of a starting pistol; no sleepy openings for her, where everyone is introduced as though they've just appeared at afternoon tea. We are thrust into the middle of the action, like it or not, and this dramatic tension often underscores the pleasure one feels as the story reveals itself. Like so much of the experience translated in this collection, ``All Across Atlantis'' captures our efforts to retrieve a mostly irretrievable past. Eisenberg attempts this feat through the comprehension of a daughter mourning her mother's death and life, so that by story's end we are given to see the entire swirl of the displaced -- ``alive, blinking in the indifferent American sun.''

``Don't be so impatient,'' Anna's tutor tells her when she is young, struggling with math and the world at large. ``Don't fight so hard against it; if you want to know something you don't already know, you have to let yourself change.'' Excellent advice, for math and for living, and it defines the elasticity of consciousness present in Eisenberg's finest work.