Some Other Better Otto By Deborah Eisenberg Pdf 11: The Yale Review's Featured Fiction by Eisenberg

If for no other reason than its placement at the beginning of the book, "Twilight of the Superheroes" makes it clear that all of the subsequent stories take place in the post-9/11 moment. It sets the tone for the collection and acts as a kind of prologue, giving us a sense of how characters feel their ordinary lives have changed in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. The story bounces between Lucien and his nephew Nathaniel, who each interpret 9/11 from a different generational perspective. Nathaniel remembers the explosions simply as the "moment out on the terrace when Lyle spilled his coffee and said 'Oh shit,' and something flashed and something tore, and the cloudless sky ignited."1 In Eisenberg's hands, 9/11 takes place in a single indeterminate instant. Nathaniel cannot put his finger on the "something" that happened, and characterizes it only in the vernacular of his daily life. Simply: before the attacks, the terrace had "the best view on the planet. Then, one morning, out of a clear blue sky, it became, for a while, probably the worst" (16). One moment the towers were visible in the skyline; and the next moment they weren't. Yet the instantaneous change introduces a fraught period of indeterminate length in which we assume the characters will struggle to decide how exactly to remember the event. Although the attacks occur in an instant, the noncommittal "for a while" suggests an inability on Nathaniel's part to determine how long this process will take. And indeed at the story's end he is still standing out on the terrace, struggling to make the real world congeal into a new vision of the future.

Part of what makes the remaining stories interesting is their ability to push references to the events of 9/11/2001 even further to the margins. These stories meditate on the recovery from various types of ordinary trauma, though they maintain the attacks subtly in the background of the events they narrate. On a September day in "Window," for instance, Alma gapes at the same "insane blue skies" that Nathaniel views from his balcony in the title story. For Alma, however, these skies hold not immediate disaster but a moment of respite from the protracted effects of a rapidly degenerating domestic relationship. Similarly in "Some Other, Better Otto," we meet Portia, a nine-year old who obsesses about the end of the world. Her concern is inscrutable to the other characters, but it is clear to the reader that the origins of her fear center on her parents' divorce, which occurred around 9/11. Thinking of her own divorce in "Like it or Not," Kate remembers "the shocking pain" that she and her husband "had been forced to inflict on one another. Eventually when they'd touched, it was like touching a wound" (103). The intensity of the pain eventually dissipates, even though its mark remains present as a scar. Kate recovers slowly and thinks, "It will be over soon, it will be better tomorrow, next week you won't even remember..." (125). Unlike Nathaniel and Lucien, Kate has a sense that with patience and persistence comes the possibility of moving forward.

Some Other Better Otto By Deborah Eisenberg Pdf 11

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Outside the hall after the concert, Penwad and his wife approach Aaron and point out notable dignitaries and other members of elite society, including the woman who is hosting a reception for Shapiro at her home that evening. Her haughty son stops to talk to Shapiro, and in the midst of their conversation, thejournalist Beale approaches, sloppily eating an orange. He apologizes to Shapiro for getting drunk during their interview. The pompous youth with whom Shapiro has been talking makes a rude comment, indicating that Beale is not welcome at the reception. Shapiro is appalled, and Beale is livid, calling the boy a "Little putrid viper." Joan, Penwad's snobbish wife, beckons to Shapiro, saying it is time to leave for the reception. He joins her, but before he leaves, he wants to find Beale, feeling bad for him. He searches and finally locates him, "crouched in the corner of a concrete trough that must have been intended as some sort of reflecting pool." He is talking into his tape recorder, describing the elegant party to which he has not been invited. He speaks tenderly, almost as if talking to a lover, describing the Indian children of the servants playing a game near the fountain and reminiscing about the beauty of the country before the war. Finally, he puts the tape recorder behind his head like a pillow, and stretches out in the trough for a nap. The last thing he tells the recorder is, "everyone has something, some little thing, my darling, they've been waiting so long to tell you."

All Around Atlantis, the short-story collection in which "Someone to Talk To" appears, was critically well received. Two of the stories from the collection, "Across the Lake" and "Mermaids," won O. Henry Awards. "Someone to Talk To," though not considered the best story of the collection by many critics, was occasionally mentioned in reviews. A reviewer from Kirkus Reviews calls the story "superb," and R. Z. Sheppard, in a review for Time magazine, specifically praises the character Beale: "In 'Someone to Talk To,' a journalist who won't stop gabbing about himself long enough to ask a question is worthy of Evelyn Waugh." Gail Caldwell of the Boston Globe, however, felt that the three stories in the collection set in Central America "suffer from a pedantic overkill on the displaced-imperialist theme." Referring specifically to "Someone to Talk To," she writes, "I felt I was reading a workshop exercise by someone who loved Graham Greene, without being anything like Graham Greene." Jim Shepard of the New York TimesBook Review, in an otherwise positive review of the collection, complains briefly of Eisenberg's "fondness for pointedly illuminating chance encounters with eccentrics, who through their ramblings focus the stories' themes while bringing the usually somewhat baffled protagonists up to speed." Though he does not mention the character Beale by name as one of these eccentrics, the description certainly fits.

Aaron's relationship with Caroline reaches a crisis when he challenges her reassuring platitudes that "Things will work out." Breaking his silence, Aaron replies harshly that things will undoubtedly work out, "for some other species. Or on some other planet." While Caroline has a bright outlook that springs from her idyllic childhood, Aaron has a darker outlook that Caroline cannot accept. Aaron's view is that "he, like most humans, was an experiment that had never been expected to succeed, a little padding around some evolutionary thrust, a scattershot nubbin of DNA." He feels that he, as an individual within the great scheme of things, does not matter. Life and evolution do matter, but he is irrelevant to both. In this most extreme disconnection, Aaron is divorced from life itself.

Soon after the narrator's arrival in Montreal, Ivan decides to fly home to spend Christmas with his son and former wife. Left alone in Ivan's world, the narrator confronts her own loneliness and questionable self-sufficiency: "I felt I had been equipped by a mysterious agency: I knew without asking how to transport myself into a foreign city, my pockets were filled with its money, and in my hand I had a set of keys to an apartment there." This feeling is only the beginning of her quest for self-identification. The narrator descends first into sleep, unconsciously fasting, and then goes on a grocery-shopping spree in the clothes that some other woman has left in Ivan's closet. When she returns to Ivan's apartment she finds it inhabited by a waiflike man who claims that Ivan owes him money. This man, Eugene, offers her drugs, but what makes an impression on the narrator is Eugene's beauty: "He was beautiful, I saw. He was beautiful. He sparkled with beauty; it streamed from him in glistening sheets, as if he were emerging from a lake of it." They sleep together, and the narrator uses the remainder of her foreign currency to pay off Ivan's debts.

Lynnie and Isobel were friends more from a lack of anything better to do than from any real affinity for one another. Lynnie idolized the beautiful, wealthy, and slightly older Isobel. During summer bike rides they often visited a wonderful house that becomes central to the rest of the story: 2ff7e9595c