Stories (So Far) of Debo

When her first collection, Transactions in a Foreign Currency, appeared in 1987, Eisenberg was already a master of New Yorker-ish stories. She studded her gentle satires of the upper and bohemian classes with moments of startling, acute sympathy: ""at the sight of the cloakroom, with its rows of expensive, empty coats that called up a world in which generous, broad-shouldered men, and women in marvelous dresses (much like the one I myself happened to be wearing) inclined toward each other on banquettes, I was pierced by a feeling so keen and unalloyed it might have been called-I don't know what it might have been called. It felt like-well, grief... actually."" Eisenberg favors first-person narrators and is an excellent mimic. Her reconstruction of altered states-drunk, drugged, dreaming or simply dazed-recall Anne Beattie. In stories like ""Flotsam"" or the brilliant ""A Lesson in Traveling Light,"" Eisenberg ventures fearlessly into Beattie territory of baffled post-1960s (or '70s, or '80s) disaffection and claims it for her own. The addition of such works as ""The Robbery,"" ""Presents,"" ""The Custodian"" and ""Under the 82nd Airborne"" brings new menace to her oeuvre. With these stories from her 1991 collection (also called Under the 82nd Airborne), her satire becomes less gentle. Its targets range from adultery to American imperialism, and everywhere violence and self-destruction threaten the sad, fragile lives that her characters build for themselves. The reprinting of these two collections as one is sure to win Eisenberg's stories an even wider audience than they now enjoy. (Mar.)