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 When Steven Millhauser won the Pulitzer Prize last year, it was for Martin Dressler, a taut, realistic novel set in turn-of-the-century Manhattan. In contrast, the best, and strangest, of his curious and tantalizing new stories are dreamy tales of altered consciousnesses – a child on a flying carpet, a balloon navigator in the Franco-Prussian War; the most original and successful are written in the first person plural. They are told by dry, anonymous voices: by people who are at once a community and an audience, since the stories are characteristically about peep shows, pleasure domes and performances. They recount, in a sense, the communal fantasies of a democracy. They have a characteristic modern tone of commentary, or record, or journalism – they occasionally include imaginary reporting in their accounts. But what they tell is like Hawthorne, Hoffman and Kafka. Indeed, Kafka's tale of Josefina, the singer of the mouse people, is the nearest analogy I can think of for the narrative voice. The title story is about a performance by a virtuoso knife thrower, Hensch, maker of precise bloody marks. It moves from skill to the fulfillment of secret desires, in the audience and in those members of the audience who volunteer as targets. It steps beyond the bounds of the comfortable, and the shrewd, complicit representative voice goes with it. "The Sisterhood of Night" describes, precisely and dryly, the rumors and theories surrounding a secret society of girls aged 12 to 15 who meet in silence at night in a small town. The voices are a blend of gossip and reportage. The girls may be doing something unacceptable or nothing at all. There may be a witch hunt in the making. Or the whole thing may merely be a comic fuss about adolescent secret societies. The best stories of all add to the communal whisper an interest in artifacts, constructions, inventions, mostly those constructed by our grandparents in the days of clockwork and early technologies. In Little Kingdoms Millhauser wrote brilliantly about the real and unreal forms of the first animated cartoons, a new kind of two-dimensional imaginary world for the mind to inhabit. Here "The New Automaton Theater" tells the tale of a German city proud of its miniature theaters, and the career of a master automaton maker who moves from perfect miniature verisimilitude to grotesque caricature. The anonymous narrative voice analyzes the pleasure in miniaturization, the pleasure in likeness, the pleasure in unlikeness. "The real is used to bring forth the unreal," it says. In "The Dream of the Consortium" Millhauser has created what must be almost the ultimate version of that minor genre, the department store fiction. The consortium buys the department store and makes in it a fantasy world where the consumer may purchase anything he wants, enter a reconstruction of any time or place he chooses. Millhauser's own ingenuity is delicious – he moves from catalogues of objects where the precision of his own solid imagination is the pleasure, to huge impossible commercial projects, to a metaphysical version of the sense we all have in shopping malls that there is no way out of these alleys and vistas of requited desire and artificial paradises (and infernos, for those who want them). His eclectic lists are dizzying: "you could purchase quartz heaters, power mowers, Venetian palazzi, electric pencil sharpeners, Scottish castles, cordless phones with ten-channel autoscan, flying buttresses, mulching tractors . . . lagoons, sphinxes, exercycles, black leather recliners, Upper Palaeolithic Caves with drawings of bisons . . . " and on and on. "Paradise Park" is an account of a pleasure garden, destroyed by fire in 1924, built by a master entrepreneur and master of disguise, which begins as an innocent fun-fair, expands into the sky and layer after layer under the earth, becoming in the end earthly paradise, Vanity Fair and towering inferno. Here again the strength and glitter of its imaginative grip lies in Millhauser's ability to weave detail into detail, the lovingly real and possible into the extravagantly impossible, created with the same imaginative precision. The park even contains a perfect miniaturized working model of itself. And so ad infinitum. What is the fascination of these communal artifacts? I think that we as a group feel a kind of horror, as well as an aesthetic admiration, at skill in puppetry, automation, mimicry. We are troubled by arts like knife-throwing, which make artificial plays with real dangers. Coleridge, writing of the imagination and mimesis, claimed that whereas we love real peaches and skillful paintings of peaches, we recoil in horror from a mimetic marble peach. Millhauser's world is the imaginary world that once held angels and demons, mythic beasts and gardens, heaven and hell. The imagery of our human frontiers, upward and downward – the blue heaven above and the cavern below – appears with surprising constancy in his tales. His characters soar into the blue, stepping off gables astride flying carpets, in hot air balloons, on Ferris wheels. They go underground – the last tale in the book, "Beneath the Cellars of Our Town," is an account of an American town that tends and preserves a system of underground passages (where no one ever gets lost) in order to experience again and again the pleasure of going into the dark, and also of returning to daylight and seeing it differently. Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" constructed a secondary paradise, "a sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice." In a way, Millhauser's anonymous representative narrators inhabit a tertiary paradise, a tertiary underworld. He is not condemning the commercial or the artificial. He is making them strange, celebrating their true, innocent and sinister poetry. He is celebrating the arts that satisfy communal desires – for gossip, for escape, for imagined elsewheres. He does it for the most part through the artifacts of previous generations, which have become part of our communal fantasy. (He reminds me a little of Brian Moore, whose Great Victorian Collection was an early exercise in this mode, and whose latest novel is about a 19th-century mesmerist.) It would be possible to relate these backward-looking tales to the anticipation of our stepping, as whole communities, into virtual worlds much as we step into rooms with magic windows in the corners, flickering images of everything and everywhere at us, appealing to our desire to consume. But he is also doing what all good art does: explaining art itself, how it works and how it works on us, how much and why and in what riddling ways we need it.
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