magazine_final_online

And yet since literature
has its size queens
insisting that bigger is
better, it should be said
that women (in fiction
as in life) have moved
beyond the playground
and onto the battlefield,
beyond the supposed
safety of the kitchen into
the big bad world outside.
How odd, then, that the Hemingway story should
take place mostly on a cot outside a tent, between
a man and a woman in the midst of an upper-class
sports-adventure entertainment. Caught up in his feelings,
unaware of the colonial fallout around him, Bwana
can write home from the safari with zero awareness
of how he wound up giving orders to his, personal boy.
There is talk of money, but the subtheme of economics
doesn’t get much broader than a few insults leveled
by the dying writer against the, rich bitch who has
supported him, the, destroyer of his talent. At one point
he tells her cleverly, Your damned money was my armor.
For all his Big Subjects men at war, men and peace, men
without women Hemingway wasn’t a Big Picture guy.
It’s possible to read For Whom the Bell Tolls and remain
clueless as to who was fighting, or why.
Meanwhile, a rather large wedge of reality has been
neatly slipped into the pages of, Under the 82nd Airborne.
The reason that Caitlin the down-on-her-luck
actress in Eisenberg’s story finds herself in a room with
Lewis and his mixed feelings about fish involves an
escalating, undeclared war in Central America, a somewhat
larger canvas than a safari tent in the bush. (I’m
not suggesting that a great work can’t be written about
so small a site Beckett often stays in one room or that
there is any reason a writer should address our costly
interference in the political affairs of other countries.
There’s no reason an artist should do anything at all.
I’m merely pointing out that these two arenas inside,
private, the heart versus outside, public, the mind are
not always divided neatly by gender.)
Under the 82nd Airborne is not the only Eisenberg
story to deal with the grim realities of Central American
politics. She has also written about the Holocaust.
And even her most, domestic and interior stories are
permeated with the facts and details of social class. So
one might expect male critics to encourage this girl-author’s
valiant efforts to break away from the altar boudoir
axis. But, writing in the Los Angeles Times, Richard
Eder recoiled from the, coarse and loud voice of these
subtle, understated stories, and he refined his opinion
in a patronizing, bizarre review of Eisenberg’s latest
collection, All Around Atlantis, calling her, a writer who
bumps between what she does beautifully and what
she seems to feel she ought to do. Her gift is to chart the
22