“Crazy,” Benjamin Lebert’s debut, as a 17-year-old, was a triumph of experience over innocence. Mr. Lebert was credited for his treatment of vice – not as proof against naivete, but as a preview of his generation’s flavor.

Prodigies must answer for their age group: Just how bad are the teenagers this time? “I don’t want to become a grown-up; I want to remain a perfectly normal kid,” explains Mr. Lebert’s first narrator, who has just lost his virginity. Not rebellious, he resents vice as simply incumbent on him, as a millenarian teen. He speaks tersely, as if wary, responsibly, of adult subtlety. His ironical stance made a great sound in his native Germany, and it was not unheard here.

Now comes Mr. Lebert’s second novel, “The Bird Is a Raven” (Alfred A. Knopf, 112 pages, $16.95), published in Germany in 2003 when the author was 21. What marvelous difference separates 17 and 21? None. Consider the first paragraph of “Crazy”:

So this is where I’m supposed to stay. Until I graduate, if possible. That’s the plan. I stand in the parking lot of Castle Neuseelen Boarding School and look around. My parents are standing beside me. They brought me here. I’ve got four schools behind me now. This is to be my fifth. And the fifth is finally supposed to raise my damn math score from a 6 to a 5. I can’t wait.

This paragraph aspires to be hardboiled, but it is informative and good-natured – more anxious than bold. That “damn” is pure artifice; it proves the genuine teenage voice. But look at the 21-year-old voice:

I finished high school in Munich. When I was twenty I moved to Berlin to study ethnology. I shared an apartment in Schoneberg with two other students. A guy named Randall and a girl named Sofia. I hardly spent any time studying. I didn’t really give a damn about anything.

Again a slacker; again “damn.” The opening lines of “The Bird Is a Raven” do not discredit the style of “Crazy,” which seemed to be so inevitable. Rather, these lines show how canny Mr. Lebert has been from the beginning.

Mr. Lebert manipulates the very fabric of naivete. His narrator, Paul, meets another young man, Henry, in a sleeper car on the way to Berlin. Henry relates a fantastic tale of his love triangle with an anorexic girl and an obese man. Paul is diffident. He acts as if he hasn’t heard of eating disorders, but his interior thoughts match Henry’s lurid tale, point for point. They share an overstated sex drive, fringed with Thanatos.

“I’m crazy about girls,” Henry says, “There’s this superior, celestial quality about everything they do … at the same time I want to kill them, in a, like, really brutal way. All of them.” Paul tries to talk him down, though he turns out to be a misogynist himself. In both cases, Mr. Lebert implies that a youthful lack of perspective distorts reality in ways unimagined by supposedly more experienced adults.

As literary inspiration, this is pretty limiting, and Mr. Lebert’s promise now looks thin. The fallacy of self-confident nihilism bears little variation, however alluring it may be as a documentary written by a 17-year-old. As a 20-something, Mr. Lebert will have to face up to his own ambition, if he has any.

***

September 11 dominates Deborah Eisenberg’s new story collection. A renowned short-story writer, Ms. Eisenberg typically sets a slightly crazy character in a matrix of difficult personal relationships, watches him or her struggle for a few weeks, and then ends the story. Her repertoire draws from the all-American gallows humor of sitcoms and serial comic strips: In-laws might harass a widower, a mordant gay man might say something about his siblings, such as “they had been one another’s environs as children.” His sister might speak to that same gay man “as if she were speaking to an armed high-school student.”

While the American short story as practiced by George Saunders and Annie Proulx has turned to the world of Nascar dads, Ms. Eisenberg is still, happily, lending her ear to the soccer mom.

In “Twilight of the Superheroes” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 226 pages, $23), Ms. Eisenberg evokes the recent arrival of foreign affairs in the quotidian American psyche. The last sentence of the collection is telling: Two adults kiss on a subway platform in Washington, “as if before a decisive separation, the way lovers do in wartime.” She sometimes manages to exaggerate the importance of the September 11 attacks, as when she writes:

Or maybe his nephew’s is the last generation that will remember what it had once felt like to blithely assume there would be a future – at least a future like the one that had been implied by the past they’d all been familiar with.

This would seem to mock the vainglorious hand-wringing lately evinced by some island-minded Manhattanites, but it does not quite have the bite of satire. Indeed, Ms. Eisenberg’s relatively weak title story, in which a group of aimless young people witness the destruction of the World Trade Center from their scandalously underpriced sublet loft, reads as a mathematical formula dutifully worked out to portray the September 11 zeitgeist.

Benjamin Kunkel’s novel “Indecision” covers similar territory with noncommittal grace, whereas Ms. Eisenberg’s deep seriousness cannot resist the actual awkwardness of this material. To borrow a phrase from one of her characters, her best stories read as though “the whole thing had twisted itself into shape.” Her more topical stories lack that organic charm. Nonetheless, Ms. Eisenberg’s collection contains several portraits of contemporary distress that are unmatched in recent American fiction.

blytal@nysun.com