Looking at ‘The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013’

Let’s not pull any punches: The very best thing about “The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013� is the inclusion of Deborah Eisenberg’s “Your Duck Is My Duck.� No disrespect to the other 19 contributors — who include Tash Aw, Donald Antrim, Jamie Quatro and Ann Beattie — but in my universe, there are few miracles as rare and beautiful as a story by Eisenberg.

She doesn’t publish much: 30 or so stories since her first collection, “Transactions in a Foreign Currency,� came out in 1986. It’s been seven years since her last book of new work, “Twilight of the Superheroes,� although “The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg,� did win a 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award.

Still, there is nothing spare or scarce about her vision, which is expansive, global even, walking a line between politics and personality, tracing not just the inner life of her subjects but also, in a very real sense, their complicity. “Here you’re able to speak freely, within reason, of course,� a character observes of America in the desperate aftermath of Sept. 11, “and isn’t it wonderful that you all happen to want to say exactly what they want you to say?�

“Your Duck Is My Duck� operates out of a similar sensibility, although it’s fair to say, I think, that it has more in common with Eisenberg’s pre-“Twilight of the Superheroes� work. Like many stories in her first three collections, it takes place in Latin America, in an unnamed country that could be Mexico.

The set-up is simple: An artist at loose ends is invited by a wealthy couple to visit their south-of-the-border hacienda for a few months of work, or R ’n’ R. Once she arrives, she discovers that the situation is far more complicated -- ethically and emotionally -- than she had thought.

“Apparently, most of the people in the area had lived for centuries by working little farms,� Eisenberg writes. “But a few years earlier there had been relentless rain, and the flooding had washed out the crops, and then there was a second year of that. The third year was a drought, and so was the next one, so none of the new planting could establish roots, and it all blew away.�

In an attempt to rectify (or capitalize on) the problem, her hosts, Ray and Christa, begin to buy up all the farmland, planting eucalyptus “as a cash crop,� until it burns in lightning storms. “So naturally,� Eisenberg continues, “local people who could leave were leaving, and a lot of the foreigners, like Ray and Christa, who had places in the areas were pulling up stakes, too.�

This is what Eisenberg does so brilliantly, tracing not the law of unintended consequences so much as a matrix of responsibility that links us underneath the surface of the everyday. The paradise to which the artist has been invited does not exist; it’s not even a fantasy so much as a lie. Her presence implicates her in the corruption, and yet, what else is she supposed to do? “It’s odd — no matter how you feel about a place, it’s as though you exchange something with it,� she explains. “It keeps a little bit of you, and you keep a little bit of it.�

The same, of course, is true of Eisenberg’s writing, which unfolds in the tenuous middle territory between our inextricable connectedness and our desire (need?) to set ourselves apart.

“It was a different time here — must that not mean that different things were happening?� her narrator tells us. “I’d brought my computer, but maybe I could actually just not turn it on, and the dreary growth of little obligations that overran my screen would just disappear; maybe the news, which — like a magic substance in a fairy tale — was producing perpetually increasing awfulness from rock-bottom bad, would just disappear.�

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