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A Novel by William Eisner
Format: Hardcover, 224 pp.
ISBN: 0-9671851-6-5
Pub Date: May 2002
Price: $23.00
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William Eisner has always been a man tugged in opposing directions: a part of him drawn to the practical world of science and the other to the imagined world of fiction. Soon after receiving his engineering degree, restless and considering a technical education alone insufficient, he left New York, his birthplace, for Paris and studied for a year at the Sorbonne. He completed their Language and Civilization program, wrote short stories, and lived the bohemian life. He found Paris, and Europe, so congenial that he stayed on for six years, working on engineering projects in France, Italy and Germany.
Upon his return to the U.S. Eisner joined Rockwell International's aerospace operations, rose to Vice President of Engineering, then Division V.P. and General Manager. In 1980 he was appointed Executive Vice President, later President and CEO, of Electronics Corporation of America, a Boston-based firm and the world's leading supplier of photoelectric devices. During those years, the other part of him, subdued by the pressures of business, continued to surface—in literary grace notes woven into technical papers and business correspondence.
Eisner now devotes himself to writing. In his first published novel, The Sévigné Letters, a French novel in style and sensibility, he returned to the Paris years. The theme of the book had long intrigued him, a love affair between a young man and an older woman complicated by cultural distinctions. It is a novel of manners, of avarice and generosity, and the intuitive and irrational nature of choice. The work received excellent reviews, was adapted for the stage by Elaine Kendall, the fiction critic of the Los Angeles Times, and successfully produced by the Lobero Theater Foundation in Santa Barbara. Eisner's short fiction has been published on the Internet at HotRead.com and in Witness. He is now completing another novel, a tale of obsession, love and betrayal set in the world of aerospace.
William Eisner is Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Arthur Metcalf Charitable Foundation and Vice-Chairman of the United States Strategic Institute, both based in Boston. He is also a member of the Jonathan Club in Los Angeles. He resides in Pacific Palisades, California, with his wife Leti. They have three children.
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From the author of the highly-acclaimed novel THE SÉVIGNÉ LETTERS comes a collection so irresistible that the reader is hooked from the getgo--and utterly unable thereafter to turn away from the diverse worlds where William Eisner's characters are busy living their lives. Felons, business execs, con men, university professors, realtors, sweatshop owners, songwriters, researchers, prostitutes, and even, on occasion, the recently dead, tell their stories here, narratives that explore the human condition head-on.
In "Heist," the collection's novella, we meet an accountant/auditor who works across the street from a bank and who--on those days when the armored car comes to collect the bank's cash--can't help but fantasize over the many ways in which his humdrum life (six-year relationship with a woman he doesn't really want to marry, mother who calls him regularly to carry out tasks she is capable of doing herself) would improve were he to rob the truck.
In "Arthur," one of the twelve stories that make up the rest of the collection, a husband rendered companionless when his wife drifts into dementia sets out to find the components of a project he began years ago. In seeking out this fragment of his past, however, he discovers a chunk of his wife's past, and the project that ends up engaging him is not at all the one he expected.
Other stories include: an engineer whose fear of losing his job prompts him to consider keeping a company blunder under wraps; a secretary who invents moral dilemmas--for her philosophy professor boss to use in class--decides to become a moral dilemma herself; a fearful man manages one final act of courage after losing his grip on reality while visiting a foreign country; an aging man discovers the fountain of youth in a most unexpected and astonishing location...
DONE IN BY INNOCENT THINGS is an exploration of the pivotal events in its characters' lives, the episodes that will--for better or worse--forever alter them. The stories are informed by wit, grace, intelligence, and Eisner's special gift for conveying a multitude of details with great efficiency. The enigma of who we really are and why we behave as we do is not eradicated in DONE IN BY INNOCENT THINGS; it is probed, thrown up to the light, and actively celebrated.
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