Jesse Eisenberg’s portrayal of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network transformed him from an interesting, oddball indie actor into the world’s most eligible geek. He is now set to play Lex Luthor in the forthcoming blockbuster Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. But his first collection of short fiction suggests that, when not being cast as ruthless megalomaniacs, he is an acutely anxious, deeply insecure New York homebody and a potential successor to Woody Allen’s troubled crown.
As a reluctant celebrity who admits to visiting two therapists every week, Eisenberg is clearly discerning about his neuroses. The book is full of shrinks and analysts, including a marriage-guidance counsellor’s contribution to a basketball game: “Let’s go Knicks!!! But let’s also recognise the positive attributes of the opposing team!!!” It is a theme further pursued in a piece first published in the New Yorker, in which a young man seeks relationship advice from veteran basketball commentator Marv Albert, who responds with a stream of sportscaster cliches: “Stuck outside the perimeter! Unable to penetrate! Just can’t find the hole!”
You don’t have to be a psychoanalyst, or even a basketball aficionado, to surmise that Eisenberg’s chief problem may be a deep-seated separation anxiety, intensified by the unfeeling American custom of packing unwilling pre-teens off to summer camp. He provides a doleful mock-prospectus for such an event: “We will be introducing a new elective this year, called Lamentation Period, where campers are given time to reflect on their relationship with their mothers and lament the futility of life away from the home. Fears of college can also be prematurely contemplated at this time.”
Reading these stories, you are reminded that in addition to his screen work and parallel career as an off-Broadway playwright, Eisenberg is also the founder of OneUpMe.com, an internet forum in which players are challenged to post a response wittier and more sophisticated than the one before. Many pieces take the form of scraps that could be posted to that site: his favourite trick is to establish a seemingly mundane conversation that puts on an unexpected spurt of intellectual energy. Only Eisenberg could claim to have received a spam message that reads: “I’ve gotten really hot just thinking about you! So, to cool down, I started rereading Chaucer! Wow! What a rediscovery! So dense but so (deceptively) fun!” Quite a lot of the material bears witness to the fact that he majored in social anthropology, and can be reluctant to let you forget it.
Yet as a satirist, he rarely fails to hit the target, and his barbs are frequently tempered by a genuine sense of compassion. The title story, for example, takes the form of a series of restaurant reviews written by an articulate nine-year-old who rates some of New York’s most exclusive eateries on a precise scale of one to 2,000 stars. Gradually, it becomes apparent that he is eating with just his mother because his parents are separated and his absent father has agreed to foot the bill. The story develops into a sharp indictment of laissez-faire parenting, as the narrator turns his critical attention to the contents of his lunchbox: “Mom’s lunches are never actually possible to eat. One time, she packed me a single stick of Juicy Fruit gum, a box of toothpicks, and a note asking me to stay late after school because a gentleman friend was coming over.”
Eisenberg writes convincingly as a neglected tweenager, though it is in the guise of a conflicted adult that his true voice seems to emerge. You hear it in the lame boast that his companion at the ballgame is a cultural anthropologist: “That’s the kind of people I hang out with … Knicks games, cultural anthropologist. Lowbrow, highbrow. I’m hard to pin down. I’m all over the map.” In truth, Eisenberg’s reach rarely extends beyond the street plan of Manhattan. But within those confines he is, unquestionably, all over the map.
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