For almost 40 years, Steven Millhauser has been creating fables of identity, exploring how an irruption of the magical or inexplicable can unexpectedly transform a life or an entire society. In a loose sense, he is a writer of literary fantasies, belonging to that fabulist line that runs from the “Arabian Nights” stories through the unsettling tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann on to the magic-realist masterpieces of Kafka, Nabokov, Borges and Calvino. His work illustrates the very definition of the uncanny — that moment when the homey or familiar suddenly swerves into something rich, strange and menacing.
In general, Millhauser’s style blends a peculiar wistfulness with a fanatical attention to the particular: He has said that “one never forgives a work of art that is general and vague.” Like his illustrious antecedents (and such near contemporaries as Russell Hoban, Angela Carter, John Crowley and Michael Chabon), Millhauser calmly mixes fairy tale and literary experiment, surreal nightmare and ecstatic vision, gorgeous prose and sly humor. But he also adds a profound Americanness. Is there a better evocation of a middle-class childhood in the 1950s than his novel “Edwin Mullhouse”? Millhauser owns the smell of fresh tar on streets, the creak of gliders on wooden porches, the rivalries of the playground and all those rainy Saturday afternoons playing Clue and reading comic books.
More from Michael Dirda
Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World and the author of the memoir “An Open Book” and of four collections of essays: “Readings,” “Bound to Please,” “Book by Book” and “Classics for Pleasure.”
Most impressively, though, he skirts the real danger of sentimentality through an iron control of tone: Millhauser’s voice on the page is cool, reserved, profoundly courteous. Unusually, he often employs the first-person plural, drawing his readers into a shared dream or nightmare. Take the opening to “The Invasion From Outer Space”:
“From the beginning we were prepared, we knew just what to do, for hadn’t we seen it all a hundred times? — the good people of the town going about their business, the suddenly interrupted TV programs, the faces in the crowd looking up, the little girl pointing in the air, the mouths opening, the dog yapping, the traffic stopped, the shopping bag falling to the sidewalk, and there, in the sky, coming closer . . . ”
Along with “The Invasion from Outer Space,” “We Others” contains six additional new stories, as well as 14 selected from “In the Penny Arcade” (1986), “The Barnum Museum” (1990), “The Knife Thrower” (1998) and “Dangerous Laughter” (2008). In an author’s note, Millhauser tells us that he has chosen the ones “that seized my attention as if they’d been written by someone whose work I had never seen before.” Sadly, he hasn’t reprinted any of his superb novellas from “The King in the Tree” (2003) and “Little Kingdoms” (1993) nor the novella-length tales embedded in his baroque extravaganza, “From the Realm of Morpheus” (1986).
One might argue with some of his selections and omissions — where is the gorgeous “Cathay”? — but I’m glad for the inclusion of his single most famous story, “Eisenheim the Illusionist,” which earned a World Fantasy Award in 1990 and later was made into a movie (called simply “The Illusionist”). It opens irresistibly:
These books offer keen insights into leadership and management challenges, which on a day-to-day basis can bring their own dramas, twisting plot lines and, in this city, political intrigue.
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