Hallucinatory Stories of Obsession and Desire / Millhauser's fantasy worlds have a persuasive logic


By Steven Millhauser

Crown; 256 pages; $22

With so many fine American writers on the scene, it may be presumptuous to single out one author who "needed" to win a Pulitzer Prize last year. Still, Steven Millhauser -- who received the award for his novel " Martin Dressler : The Tale of an American Dreamer" -- richly deserved it.

Since the publication in 1972 of his debut novel, "Edwin Mullhouse," Millhauser has diligently dreamed up worlds where workaday lives float ineluctably into the realm of the fantastic. Critical praise has been extensive, but it hasn't always led to wide readership. His 1993 collection of novellas, "Little Kingdoms," was a dazzler, but it's had to wait until this year -- and the success of "Martin Dressler" -- to enjoy paperback publication. Only now are Millhauser's books turning up in any quantity on bookstore shelves.

For readers familiar only with "Martin Dressler," the 12 stories in his new book, "The Knife Thrower," will reveal the eclectic variety of his imagination. For longtime fans, though, the book confirms his consistency, since almost every tale in it echoes or expands upon imagery, technique and subject matter explored in his earlier fiction.

The most lightsome offering, "Flying Carpets," recalls "Snowmen" from Millhauser's 1985 collection, "In the Penny Arcade." Both stories have placid small-town settings, and both take a tone of fond reminiscence.

The opening of "Flying Carpets" could not be more innocuous: "In the long summers of my childhood, games flared up suddenly, burned to a brightness, and vanished forever." But just as the snow creations in "Snowmen" take a turn for the surreal ("a clock of snow with a moving ice pendulum"), so do the games of the new story. When the narrator's father brings home a flying carpet for his son, as nonchalantly as you would a skateboard or a Hula Hoop, a whole new airborne world opens up for the boy.

Preposterous? Yes, but strangely persuasive as well. Millhauser spells out this paradox when his narrator, trying to dismiss rumors of "cloud-towns" and sky rivers said to exist in the upper atmosphere, ends up having to admit that "even as you refused to believe them, you saw them, as if the sheer effort of not believing them made them glow in your mind."

Many of Millhauser's confabulations affect the reader in just this way, whether they depict present-day upstate New York, Kaspar Hauser's Nuremberg, the Paris of the 1870 siege or a Coney Island amusement park of the 1920s, to pick just four from this collection. Still, not every tale in the book feels as buoyant as "Flying Carpets." In the title story and elsewhere, a psychosexual yearning toward violence makes Millhauser's world as sinister as it is fanciful.

That story is narrated by an anonymous collective "we" who witness a most unusual circus act: a knife-wielding performer whose daredevil routine climaxes with his "well- wounded" female assistant receiving "the mark of the master." When an audience volunteer receives "the final mark, the mark that can be received only once," the witnesses are titillated, agitated and left unsure as to what they've seen. A murder? A consummate piece of stage chicanery? There's no telling.

A vicarious partaking in destruction also informs the book's most substantial story, "Paradise Park," which reads like an alternative version of "Martin Dressler." Both feature entrepreneurs who start out humbly as cigar- boy/bellhops. But where Martin goes into the hotel business, Charles Sarabee goes into amusement parks. Paradise Park, his short- lived Coney Island masterpiece, is continually expanding from one subterranean level to another and features such fairground novelties as "the world's first spherical Ferris wheel" and "a reconstruction of the Horseshoe Falls composed of real Niagara water." The story's opening line reveals that it will all end in inferno, but that doesn't stop Sarabee's creation from assuming a wild, protean life in the reader's mind.

Much in the story is quintessential Millhauser, starting with the calm, unadorned narrative voice that cites surviving archival evidence of Sarabee's hallucinatory spectacle. The park's obsessive expansion underground is another recurring motif in Millhauser's fiction. The story isn't character-driven since, unlike Martin Dressler, Sarabee is seen only from a distance, and no glimpses are offered of his private life. Nevertheless, it constructs a dream project that expands to the outermost bounds, no matter how lurid, abstract or self- destructive. The main character may stay mostly out of sight, but the trajectory his world follows is powerfully cathartic.

Some of the book's offerings are less stories than prose meditations. Like Millhauser's earlier "Cathay" or "The Barnum Museum," "The Dream of the Consortium" (about an out-of- this-world department store) and "Beneath the Cellars of Our Town" (about a small town's pride in the underground labyrinth beneath it) eschew character development altogether as they conjure imaginary environments for the mind.

This is Millhauser at his purest, complete with the return to normality that follows these otherworldly excursions. This return is not a letdown -- instead, the movement between two worlds enhances appreciation of both.

Much else is worth noting here: "The New Automaton Theater," a story that picks up where Millhauser's earlier "August Eschenburg" left off; and "The Sisterhood of Night," a contemporary tale that reads like a latter-day variation on the Salem witch trials. Better to let readers discover some of the book, with its riddles, marvels and subversions of the commonplace, for themselves. They won't be disappointed.