HARD KNOCKS

By R.Z. Sheppard

Readers of Deborah Eisenberg's earlier story collections, Transactions in a Foreign Currency and Under the 82nd Airborne, already know she writes like a dream, both figuratively and literally. Her gift for projecting a variety of moods and voices sets her apart from the usual, narrowly focused short-story writer.

Far apart, as indicated by the range of Eisenberg's new collection, All Around Atlantis (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 244 pages; $23). Anna, of the title story, recalls her childhood living with her mother and the buried memories of aunts and uncles who died in Hitler's death camps. Overheard scraps of dinner-table conversation are not enough to reconstruct the past, so Anna uses her imagination. She starts by picturing a single barb on a wire, "its taper, its point, its torque, its dull gleam."

A similar theme of disappearing family members gets an updated tweak in Mermaids, when a normally inattentive father treats his daughter and her friend to a Manhattan weekend. It doesn't take an especially nasty-minded reader to suspect immediately where Daddy spends his afternoons while the girls are napping. Eisenberg goes along with the ruse by delaying details for maximum damage to the cad who would use his child as a cover.

These tales are more satirical than sentimental. In Someone to Talk To, a journalist who won't stop gabbing about himself long enough to ask a question is worthy of Evelyn Waugh. In Across the Lake, naive young Americans look for local color in an unnamed strife-torn country that could be Guatemala. Their detachment from reality echoes Paul Bowles' brutal stories of hapless adventurers.

Powerful currents of the subconscious run beneath Eisenberg's winsome surfaces. Most of her characters are swept along, but some, like Anna, the girl who imagines the Holocaust, dive right in. "How else, except in the clarity of dreams," she says, "are you supposed to see the world around you?"

--By R.Z. Sheppard