 As with many teachers who write one can detect the aroma of the classroom, the too ready acceptance of ideas that might with profit and honor have been shelved. There are too many ideas that were better in the conception than in the execution. If you read a bit at a time, you will enjoy this collection more than if you read it all at once.
Reviewed by Bob Williams
Dangerous Laughter
by Steven Millhauser
Knopf
2008, ISBN 978-0-307-26756-6, $24.00, 244 pages
Steven Millhauser, author of numerous works of fiction, won the Pulitzer Prize with his novel Martin Dressler. He teaches at Skidmore College.
The thirteen stories in this collection are divided into four groups: one story in Opening Cartoon and four stories each in Vanishing Acts, Impossible Architectures, and Heretical Histories.
The opening story acquaints us with what we will recognize as a major defining characteristic, the willingness to describe in detail. The wealth of detail, sometimes justifying the reader’s patience, is often dry and like the frequent meticulousity bordering on the insane of Kafka (think ‘The Burrow’).
The stories in Vanishing Acts concern the actual vanishing or the invisibility or the death of some character. The center of the narrative is usually a man but the character to disappear in whatever manner is a woman. The close of each of the first three stories is crushingly banal. The initial impression is that the writer is totally inept, but it becomes immediately clear that his ridiculous closings are deliberate. What, he implies, he has to offer is the journey, not a destination.
The fourth story, ‘History of a Disturbance,’ in this section is slightly different. In it a man is the narrator and the one to escape reality by a peculiar form of diminishment. Words begin to become a source of disturbance to him. He quickly develops an aversion for words that causes him to quit his job – in advertising research – and to give up speaking. His story is in the form of a message that he writes to explain himself to his wife. The logic of madness is wonderfully delineated in that the mad does not seem all that foreign or so very incorrect.
The third section ventures into strange places – weather domes that take over the world, a miniaturist who ventures below the level of the visible, a parallel town that is within walking distance, and the Tower of Babel, successfully completed and something of a disappointment. Here the meticulousity of Millhauser’s narrative comes into its own as these bizarre conceptions flourish on deadpan descriptions.
Historical Heresies deals with alternatives to reality and with unrealized possibilities – a historical society that abandons the past for the trash and ephemera of the present (looked upon as a past that is equal in value to the past about which we can actually know very little: one suspects a parody of the sterile and absurd literary studies of the past few decades), a fashion in which women freely elect the concealment of clothes and carry it to absurd lengths, a mysterious invention of moving pictures different from those that we know (this is really a ghost story), and an invention of a tactile device that carries sensual experience to levels and in directions that defy description.
As with many teachers who write one can detect the aroma of the classroom, the too ready acceptance of ideas that might with profit and honor have been shelved. There are too many ideas that were better in the conception than in the execution. If you read a bit at a time, you will enjoy this collection more than if you read it all at once. Despite its flaws I enjoyed this book and found that the rewards of some stories made the labor of reading the whole book worthwhile.
About the Reviewer: Bob Williams is retired and lives in a small town with his wife, dogs and a cat. He has been collecting books all his life, and has done freelance writing, mostly on classical music. His principal interests are James Joyce, Jane Austen and Homer. His writings, two books and a number of short articles on Joyce, can be accessed at: http://www.grand-teton.com/service/Persons_Places
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