All Around Atlantis (review)

once again flexes his researching muscles, providing a heavy dose of New York's social history. But while Stevie's young voice is an energetic change from The Alienist's narrator, John Schuyler Moore, Carr sometimes uses it as an excuse to condescend to his readers, as if he doubted they could grasp his less than subtle hints. The book also suffers from tired characters, with the exception of Stevie, about whom we learn nothing more than we did in The Alienist. The plot is sometimes farfetched, and the appearance of an aboriginal pygmy with tiny bow and poisoned arrows is simply ridiculous. The cameos by famous figures (Clarence Darrow, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Theodore Roosevelt,among others) add nothing. Finally, the group's willingness to drop their efforts to save the baby (even though they know exactly where she is) so that they can instead research Libby Hatch's his-tory is difficult to swallow. This elite team seems to have no qualms about abandoning their original project and leaving the baby in the care of a murderess. At 626 pages, TheAngel ofDark-ness requires too great an investment of time for too little return. (]0) All Around Atlantis by Deborah Eisenberg Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997, 244 pp., $23 Deborah Eisenberg's first two shortstory collections, Transactions in a Foreign Currency and Under the 82nd Airborne, established her reputation as a master of the long story. Like Alice Munro, another author with a talent for writing short stories that read like small novels, Eisenberg draws the lives of her characters with such precision that we're startled to discover her stories take only thirty or forty pages to reach an unexpected but entirely fitting conclusion. The stories collected in All Around Atlantis will meet every expectation of readers already familiar with Eisenberg's work; perhaps more importantly, these stories offer new readers a fresh vision of the intricate webs of connections that make up our lives. Each of the stories in this collection is more complex than the last, beginning with "The Girl Who Left Her Sock on the Floor." Francie, a cheeky boarding-school misfit, is left to her own devices after her mother's unexpected death—though no one seems concerned that she's just been orphaned . "The thing is . . . what am I supposed to do?" Francie asks a young nurse at the hospital where her mother died, searching for guidance in a moment of utter panic. "Well, you'll want to grieve, of course," the nurse replies, missing the point and deepening Francie's isolation. Searching for answers to that question, Francie comes to forgive her mother, a woman with a gift for mendacity, and to sympathize with the father she has long believed to be dead—the father who suddenly must care for a daughter he's never known. Francie's transformation is whoUy unexpected and, what's more astounding, completely believable. Eisenberg has a knack for representing the adolescent female mind in a way that's neither romanticized nor condescending; several of these stories rely on the juxtaposition of a young narrator's unflinching honesty 210 · The Missouri Review and the nearly unbearable circumstances in which she finds herself. The most accomplished story in this collection is "Mermaids," which follows a group of suburban girls on a spring break trip to New York City. KyIa, the narrator, has been shuffled off to the city with a neighbor and his two daughters, and Eisenberg's treatment of the child's complete lack of power in this situation is wrenching. The dark family drama in which KyIa becomes entangled is equally distressing , and the lessons she learns about self-reliance signal the too-early end of a childhood. Eisenberg's fiction has earned her numerous awards, and this collection includes some of the very best she has to offer. (PJ) My Sister Life: The Story ofMy Sister's Disappearance by Maria Flook Pantheon, 1997, 353 pp., $25 With the critical and commercial success ofAngela's Ashes, The Kiss and The Liar's Club, the memoir has become a darling genre of the publishing industry—the more revealing and sensational the subject matter, the better. But...