The edge of ordinary

In Steven Millhauser's short fiction, we are at home in a world of oddness

Author: By Margot Livesey

Date: SUNDAY, May 17, 1998

Page: D1

Section: Books

Even when Millhauser's stories do have contemporary settings, the world as we know it is transformed. In ``The Dream of the Consortium'' a shopping mall becomes something mysterious and exotic. ``The Sisterhood of Night'' describes a secret society of girls who slip out of their parents' houses at night, either to indulge in erotic rituals or to do nothing and be silent. In ``Clair de Lune'' a boy finds himself present at a nocturnal game of baseball played by girls dressed as boys. ``Flying Carpets'' delineates the mixed pleasures offered by those vehicles.

To offer a summary of Millhauser's plots might easily suggest that he is writing surreal melodramas, stories that, whatever their virtues, will make us throw up our hands in disbelief, but like Kafka -- surely one of his most important influences -- Millhauser draws us effortlessly into the shimmering worlds of his fictions. This is accomplished partly by his grasp of detail, partly by his beautiful prose. His writing has a stately quality that is hard to resist, and in five of these dozen stories he employs to wonderful effect the first person plural. How can we argue with these narrators when they speak not as individuals but for a community? ``When we learned that Hensch, the knife thrower, was stopping at our town for a single performance at eight o'clock on Saturday night, we hesitated, wondering what we felt.'' In its specificity, its mixture of conviction and doubt, this is the perfect opening sentence not only for ``The Knife Thrower'' but also for the collection as a whole.

The story goes on to describe Hensch's single performance as he and his assistant move through a series of increasingly dangerous tricks: throwing a knife at an apple on the assistant's head, ``marking'' the assistant, marking a member of the audience. Finally the assistant steps forward. `` `Is there anyone in this audience tonight who would like to make' -- and here she paused, not hesitantly, but as if in emphasis -- `the ultimate sacrifice? This is the final mark, the mark that can be received only once.'' Onto the stage climbs ``a tall mournful-looking girl in jeans and a dark blouse, with lank long hair and slouched shoulders.'' Surely this can't be happening, thinks the audience, and indeed they remain uncertain about what exactly they witness. ``But what stayed with all of us was the absence of the sound of the knife striking the wood.''

Those familiar with Millhauser's work will, I think, inevitably be reminded of his gorgeous story ``Eisenheim the Illusionist,'' which follows, at greater length, the same obsessive trajectory from the quotidian to the extraordinary, the innocent to the fatal. Other stories in the collection too bear a debt to earlier work, most obviously ``The New Automaton Theater,'' which harks back to Millhauser's great novella, ``August Eschenburg.'' Both works offer the biography of a master automaton-maker who makes lifelike figures. August Eschenberg, however, finds himself trumped by a fellow creator whose lewd figures meet with a rapturous reception. In ``The New Automaton Theatre'' the central character, Heinrich Graum, stops working voluntarily at the height of his powers and remains silent for a dozen years.

When Graum returns to the theater something astonishing has happened to his work. The new figures ``lack grace; by every rule of classic automaton art they are inept and ugly. They do not strike us as human. Indeed it must be said that the new automatons strike us first of all as automatons.'' The audience, at first startled and dismayed, soon falls under the sway of these new creations and ``their inhuman joys and sufferings. . . . Whether our art had fallen into an unholy decadence, as many have charged, or whether it has achieved its deepest and darkest flowering, who among us can say?''

Although the first person plural plays a strong role in this collection, some of the most vivid stories are written in the first person singular. In ``A Visit'' a man goes to visit a friend living outside a remote upstate town. ``I still considered Albert my friend, in a way my best friend, even though I hadn't heard from him in nine years.'' With some difficulty the narrator finds the ``shadowy house set back in a cluster of dusty-looking trees,'' and is greeted by Albert looking much the same ``though browner and leatherier.'' Albert shows him around the house and introduces him to his wife, ``a large frog, perhaps two feet high, which sat with its throat resting on the table edge.'' Here as elsewhere, Millhauser's talent for visual detail is essential to the success of this astonishing story. It's hard to remain skeptical when he makes us see everything so clearly.

The narrator's first thought is that his old friend is making fun of him, but as the day progresses, he begins to understand that Alice is not a ``grotesque pet, a monstrous mistake of Nature,'' but ``a companion of sorts . . . Albert's pal.'' After dinner she and Albert go upstairs, leaving him alone. ``I tried to imagine frog-love, its possible pleasures, its oozy raptures, but I turned my mind violently away.'' Reluctantly he comes to realise that the two have what his own life lacks: a hidden harmony.

The narrator of ``Balloon Flight, 1870,'' an account of an attempt to escape from besieged Paris and fly over the enemy lines also, finally, glimpses a kind of harmony. Initially exhilarated by this new perspective on the world, the narrator begins to experience dread as the balloon ascends to 10,000 feet. ``It's as if within me a rift has opened; a fissure; a wound.'' The clouds become so thick that he can no longer see his hand. He and his companion have entered the ``region of erasures and absences, kingdom of dissolution.'' Gradually they descend and the narrator views ``the solid place, the human turmoil'' with relief.

Millhauser himself leaves human turmoil to his fellow authors. In his fictions people are always seeking to escape, by ascending into the air or burrowing into the earth or perfecting their art. Sometimes they go too far, for their own sakes and for the sake of their readers, but in their struggles between the real and surreal, the effable and the ineffable, art and life, these characters and their creator illuminate our struggles to live our daily lives and still keep something larger in mind.