Book Review

A HIGHBROW LOVES A LOWBROW

Bob Shacochis, author of ''Easy in the Islands,'' teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Shacochis, Bob

1986

Overview

TRANSACTIONS IN A FOREIGN CURRENCY By Deborah Eisenberg. 214 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $15.95. IN this provocative debut collection of stories, ''Transactions in a Foreign Currency,'' Deborah Eisenberg's characters are exhaustingly fascinating, made to travel outside the native land of their inner selves into a world that appears astonishingly regulated, where ostensibly enlightened men collect women the way superpowers assert spheres of influence, where sexual diplomacy becomes a contest ''to adhere to the slippery requirements of distant authorities.'' Charlotte, the physically awkward narrator of ''Flotsam,'' is told by her fashionable roommate: ''You're lucky that you're so nice. . . . Men are going to treat you really well in your next life.'' Needless to say, niceness is a disability. Charlotte, alternately bludgeoned and ignored by romance, is a victim of her own inclination to be overwhelmed by beauty and by folks like those Padgett Powell describes in his novel, ''Edisto,'' as knowing ''the whole alphabet of worldly maneuver.'' How to survive in the midst of women who always win, men who always manipulate?

• Publisher: New York Times Company
• Subject: EISENBERG, DEBORAH / SHACOCHIS, BOB