Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg (July 2018)
I read this short story collection after enjoying Eisenberg’s Transaction in a Foreign Currency and Under the 82nd Airborne. My experience with Twilight of the Superheroes was a mixed bag compared to those prior works. I did once again enjoy the writing and felt the stories were superbly told. However, unlike from my past experiences I did not particularly like any story. I suppose this is the occupational hazard of regularly reading short fiction – the dish can be well prepared but that doesn’t mean I’m going to suddenly develop an appetite for tomatoes.
I did note a couple of thoughts that caught my eye. I liked the idea that people sometimes assume the world has become a better place solely due to the fact of their existence. To me, it seems like this thought runs two ways. I suspect most people do not give themselves enough credit for how they’ve brightened the world for those closest to them. In this sense, the mere fact of existence is indeed enough. On a larger scale, however, most people probably have a lot of work left to do before they can safely say they’ve made the world a better place.
I noticed a similar thing recently at work. It seems like many of my colleagues assume they will pick up various skills, abilities, or expertise merely through osmosis, by being a sponge, by accumulating experience, and so on. Really? I think these colleagues are going to learn soon that most outcomes result from deliberate action. In my mind, examples of such things include learning new skills, writing pointless reading reviews, and making the world a better place.
The comment I liked best was about the ‘hardwired’ argument. This references the commonly heard explanation that humans do many things because they are ‘hardwired’. It is probably the laziest argument I hear regularly because (as this work points out) it explains nothing while justifying anything. A good example of this kind of argument is any explanation that uses race to explain decisions. The more I think about it, the more this line of argument needs to go away for good.
Footnotes / endnote… admin?
0. Just one out of seven this time, I’m afraid…
Once I completed the full read, I went back and reread ‘Like It Or Not’. It confirmed my hunch from above – I liked the writing and enjoyed the reading process but in terms of the story itself I suppose my reaction is best summarized by story’s title .
