by JULIET WATERS

My son, who’s just starting to read, had this to say about Twilight of the Superheroes, Deborah Eisenberg’s latest collection of short stories: “If it says superheroes, there should be pictures.” Other critics have been kinder. Routinely mentioned in the same sentence as Alice Munro, after six collections, Eisenberg has pretty much cemented her place as a master of the American short story. Still, if you’re going to put a brilliant and visceral illustration by graphic artist Hendrik Dorgathen of a broken-hearted superhero staring out across the carnage of 9/11 New York, there better be stories in this collection that are as riveting as the cover.

One of Eisenberg’s most impressive talents is her range. She writes about the lives of 20-year-olds hitting a wall of overwhelming anxiety about the future as convincingly and poignantly as she writes about 55-year-olds negotiating mid-life crises. Reading these unflinching, dramatic, depressing but strangely playful stories is something like taking grief, confusion and vulnerability and looking at it through a kaleidoscope. One tiny shift and a comfortable life disintegrates into a bruised darkness, another shift and a quietly desperate one is salvaged by an intimacy that could only emerge from tragedy. These are stories about a young girl barely out of high school discovering herself in the grip of a manipulative gun dealer, of a sad divorcee not finding love in Italy, of an aging homosexual trying to stir up intimacy with a younger lover and discovering that it’s like trying to pick a fight with “a dog toy.”

It is the title story, however, that is the tour de force of the collection. Nathaniel, a young architect and comic strip artist from the Midwest, scores an awesome sublet through the help of his uncle-in-law, Lucien, a New York gallery owner. As the story opens, Nathaniel imagines a scenario in which he tries to explain Y2K paranoia to a grandchild as the miracle of something bad that was supposed to happen but didn’t. These self-indulgent musings verge just slightly towards parody of

something one might read in McSweeney’s. Then there’s Nathaniel’s comic strip about Passivityman, who protects the worlds with his greed-repelling Shield of Sloth. This and the fact that Nathaniel and his three closest friends are living in “temporary splendor” in a penthouse Manhattan loft built and furnished by a Japanese billionaire leads to suspicions that Eisenberg, a Guggenheim fellow and winner of some of the most prestigious awards for literature, has been spending at least some time watching The O.C.

But this is not Orange County, as a visit from Russell, a literary agent from L.A., reveals. He “cannot suppress his ecstasy about how ur New York, as he puts it, Mr. Matsumoto’s loft is.” He is blown away by the design elements and the view! “This is probably the most incredible view on the planet.” Russell can be forgiven, as can the reader for a moment of puzzlement at the listless response of the roommates to his awe and to the recent news Mr. Matsumoto is soon to return to reclaim his apartment. “Why should they expect Russell—now, nearly three years later—to imagine that 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.”

And suddenly in a flash all the things that seem like irritating ennui and apathy and self-indulgence are transformed by a kind of narrative alchemy into post-traumatic stress syndrome, and one wonders how these people even get up in the morning living in a prison of memories that ordinary people have been given the luxury of forgetting.

A lesser writer would need 10 or 20 years to write about this moment in America without diminishing or overplaying the importance or impact of the tragedy. Some novelists have tried and failed (see recent reviews of Jay McInerney’s The Good Life.) Eisenberg proves in this collection that there are still master writers who might not make it to the scene of the disaster immediately, but can manage to get there when they are still needed.

TWILIGHT OF THE SUPERHEROES BY DEBORAH EISENBERG. FARRAR, STRAUSS & GIROUX, HC, 225PP, $31