Deborah Eisenberg Your Duck Is My Duck Review
Deborah Eisenberg, a professor of writing at Columbia's Schoolhouse of the Arts, is a rarity among fiction writers: ane who sticks strictly to curt stories. But as her passionately devoted fans would say, with stories like hers, who needs novels? With Your Duck Is My Duck, her much-anticipated 5th original collection and the beginning since 2006's Twilight of the Superheroesouthward, Eisenberg again proves that short fiction tin be as circuitous, fulfilling, and engrossing.
Eisenberg's mode is idiosyncratic and notoriously hard to describe. It slides in and out of tenses and points of view. It can be meandering, clashing, and pastiche-like, and yet information technology is ultimately precise, penetrating, and morally unambiguous. She is often hilarious and ever surprising. The opening judgement of the title story is a pretty good distillation of her voice: "Style back — oh, not all that long agone, actually, just a couple of years, just back earlier I'd gotten a glimpse of the gears and levers and pulleys that dredge the futurity up from the globe's core to its surface — I was going to a lot of parties." At one of these parties, the narrator, a painter in a creative slump, runs into a wealthy couple who whisk her off to their "beach identify" on an unnamed tropical island, where they seem to gather an odd array of friends, business associates, and artists. One of them, a puppeteer, explains to the narrator that the isle has descended into poverty because the wealthy couple has bought up most of its arable land. His work in progress is, fittingly, an emblematic show featuring donkeys, bats, and serfs who mount an insurrection confronting an evil monarchy that is secretly controlled by an even more than evil corporate empire. (Yes, it's depressing, the puppeteer says, but "I mean, these are the facts.")
The story's title derives from a purported Zen koan drunkenly, and inaccurately, invoked at dinner by the husband of the host couple. He reminds the team of accountants and lawyers he has inexplicably gathered at his beach business firm that if the bargain they're working on falls through, he owes them nothing. "'Don't think for a moment that if the boat is scuttled, I'll throw you my rope. I'thousand sure you all recall the Zen riddle about the great Zen main, his disciple, and the duck trapped in the bottle? … Everyone remember the master's lesson? Information technology's not my duck, it'due south not my canteen, it'southward not my problem?'"
That duck hovers in the background of all six stories in this collection, especially "Merge," its tour de strength. Here, Eisenberg takes on the bailiwick of linguistic communication itself — "the tool that doesn't work," in one grapheme's interpretation.Told generally in flashbacks, "Merge" immerses us in the intersecting lives of three New Yorkers living in the aforementioned flat complex: Keith, fresh out of Princeton and now living on $10,000 he'due south stolen from his male parent, a fell helm of a scorched-world manufacture; Celeste, an idealistic young adult female with whom Keith falls unexpectedly in honey; and Celeste's neighbour Cordis, an elderly quondam bookstore owner. We besides hear about Cordis'due south beloved husband, a self-styled archaeologist bent on discovering the origins of language, who disappeared twenty years earlier during an earthworks. (Among his theories, a sound bite that could exist used to sum upward many stories in the volume: language is "amenable to many uses, but it developed to serve the pressing demands of malice, vengefulness, and greed —humanity's near consistent attributes.")
Desperately in need of coin, Keith takes a job as Cordis'due south personal assistant, and while working at that place, he grows close to Celeste. Keith is burdened by the theft of his father's coin and finally decides to confess to Celeste, just equally she is near to exit for a piece of work project in Slovakia. She cuts off ties with him, and in her absence, Keith loses his resolve to be complimentary of his begetter and drifts dorsum to the dreadful man'southward dubious protection. Cordis becomes more and more fragile. And several harrowing passages in Celeste's voice reveal that she has fallen gravely ill in Eastern Europe. These achingly real characters struggle to limited their better selves and connect with one another, but they often mangle the try or let the opportunity slip away. Words fail; the reader'south center breaks.
Heartbreak, in fact, is an inescapable theme in this volume, amid the cascades of perfectly imperfect sentences, the chuckle-inducing insights, the spot-on characterizations of contemporary mores, the unblinking intelligence, the profound (simply rarely overt) political engagement, the fierce yet tender humanism. Nosotros inhabit a world that'south "producing perpetually increasing awfulness from stone-lesser bad," and trapped ducks are everywhere. Those ducks, Eisenberg insists, are our ducks.
Source: https://www.magazine.columbia.edu/article/book-review-your-duck-my-duck