February 2, 2015
In this vividly imaginative new collection of 16 stories, Pulitzer Prize–winner Millhauser (Martin Dressler) draws a gauzy curtain of hyper-reality over mundane events and creates an atmosphere of uneasiness that accelerates to dread. Millhauser establishes tense yet wondrous tones while never resorting to melodrama; his cool, restrained voice is profoundly effective. In a couple of stories (“Sons and Mothers,” “Coming Soon”) the protagonist wakens in a different time zone after a nap and understands that his life has changed forever. In others, the narrator is a spokesperson for his community, places where residents get caught up in mass hysteria (“Elsewhere”), psychosis (“Mermaid Fever”), or a craving for deep emotion (“The Place”). Variations on fairy tales include a clever, humorous “Rapunzel,” which is reminiscent of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods. Less successful is “The Pleasures and Sufferings of Young Gautama,” a narrative of Buddha in his youth; the languor that evokes the heat and exoticism of India slows the story to a crawl. The gem of the collection is the semi-autobiographical “A Voice in the Night,” in which a young boy in the author’s own home town in Connecticut is transfixed by the biblical story of Samuel, who heard God’s voice and knew he must obey. The boy grows up to be a writer, with memories similar to those in Millhauser’s earlier book The Barnum Museum. This is a volume best read in small doses, since the voices throughout remain similar and the situations often echo one another. The cumulative effect is to transport the reader to an alternate world in which the uncanny lurks pervasively beneath the surface.
Starred review from February 1, 2015
A master storyteller continues to navigate the blurry space between magic and reality in 16 comic, frightening, consistently off-kilter tales.As a short story writer, Millhauser (English/Skidmore College; We Others, 2011, etc.) emerged in the '70s with his sensibility fully formed, taking Bernard Malamud's heady mixture of Jewish mysticism and urban life and expanding its reach to encompass palace courts and big-box suburbia. His strategy remains the same in this collection, but there's little sign that his enthusiasm has weakened. In "Miracle Polish," a man buys a mirror-cleaning chemical that makes his reflection slightly but meaningfully more upbeat and glimmering; a sly riff on the myth of Narcissus ensues. "A Report on Our Recent Troubles" describes a community wrecked by a spate of suicides, some seemingly done as perverse pleas for attention, and the narrative slowly edges toward a harrowing, Shirley Jackson-esque conclusion. That story, like many of the others here, is written in the first person plural, and Millhauser revels in upending that bureaucratic voice and making it strange; he satirizes the language of rest-home brochureware in "Arcadia," which opens gently but becomes more sinister, darkening the bland rhetoric. Millhauser does much the same with setting, complicating our notions of suburban comfort in stories like "The Wife and the Thief." As ever, he's an incessant tinkerer with ages-old myths, fairy tales and religious stories: Among the best entries here are "The Pleasures and Sufferings of Young Gautama," a tale of the young Buddha that pits foursquare language with its hero's roiling spiritual despair, and irreverent tweaks of tales about Paul Bunyan, Rapunzel, mermaids and the prophet Samuel. Millhauser intuits modes of storytelling like nobody else, and even his satire of sports-announcer-speak in "Home Run" elevates the quotidian to the cosmic. A superb testament to America's quirkiest short story writer, still on his game.
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January 1, 2015
In his latest collection of intriguing, innovative, and evocative stories, Pulitzer Prizewinner Millhauser (Martin Dressler, 1996) appropriates Buddhist mythology, American folktales, promotional brochures, and official reports as he focuses on the blurred line between the mundane and the fantastic, between skepticism and belief. Here, seemingly normal communities confront such extraordinary events as mass hysteria, cults, ghosts, and other psychic phenomena. Distant suburban towns, exurbs exotic in their ordinariness embrace their strangeness. In Phantoms, a town's long history of mysterious visitors is related through case studies along with possible explanations: are they just delusions or the ghosts of previous residents? In Mermaid Fever, a town deals with the aftermath of the discovery of the body of a 16-year-old mermaid that washes up on its shores. A Report on Our Recent Troubles recounts a disturbing fad for suicide and a town's even more disturbing proposal for dealing with it. A dreamlike quality permeates Sons and Mothers, in which a son's unannounced visit to his mother conjures feelings of loss and regret, and Coming Soon, in which a town's frenzy of development makes it virtually unrecognizable in an instant.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)
November 15, 2014
A Pulitzer Prize winner for the novel Martin Dressler, Millhauser also works well in the short form, as his recent Story Prize winner, We Others: New and Selected Stories, attests. Here are 16 pieces that investigate our inner voices in achingly real language, some showing how we are contained within our town, our homes, and ourselves and others veering off into religion or fairy tale.
Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from February 15, 2015
Imagine a town crier delivering updates to the world in the form of newsletter or annual holiday card. This is the dominant voice of this latest collection from Millhauser, a Pulitzer Prize winner for Martin Dressler. Half the stories, including "Phantoms," "Mermaid Fever," "A Report on Our Recent Troubles," "Elsewhere," and "The Place," are told in the voice of The Town. "Arcadia," the darkest of the stories, is a brochure advertising a suicide retreat complete with a suite of amenities found only in a luxury resort. There is a touch of magic realism as well, including phantoms, ghosts, mermaids, and a magical bottle of furniture polish, all revealing a sense of loss, longing, and an emptiness that cannot be expressed by ordinary means. The weakest pieces, e.g., the lengthy "The Pleasures and Sufferings of Young Guatama," move beyond town life, but the change in tone and voice is quite jarring and not entirely successful. VERDICT Millhauser's wry humor really shines in these off-kilter stories of town life. Despite a few lesser pieces, this enjoyable collection is highly recommended.--Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD
Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.