Review by New York Times Review
"I NEVER MAY BELIEVE/These antique fables, nor these fairy toys," Theseus declares in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," dismissing the poet who seeks to make something out of an "airy nothing." The sorcery Theseus deplores is Steven Millhauser's signature strength, and indeed, at the start of a Millhauser story, there is often a spirit of airiness and wonder as we enter a phantom-haunted town or the Garden of Seven Noble Pleasures. Yet the stories in Millhauser's spellbinding collection "Voices in the Night" are anchored by dark human yearnings - for perfection, or excitement, or some ungraspable form of fulfillment. These yearnings have a combustible quality, threatening to consume the towns and minds where a pervasive sense of unease provides the tinder. For many of these characters, the exact nature of fulfillment is elusive. In "Miracle Polish," the narrator calls himself "a man weighed down with disappointment." All this changes when he obtains a mysterious "Miracle Polish," which, once applied to any mirror, reflects a vibrant version of himself, "someone in the habit of facing and overcoming obstacles." Naturally, and with the moral progression of the Narcissus myth, the narrator begins to fill his house with mirrors. But beware the uncanny magic of Millhauser: Just when you think you recognize a myth, a character, a voice - the familiar tacks toward the strange and unexpected. Our "cautious" hero enacts a violence that has been writhing beneath the prose all along. Here and with "The Pleasures and Sufferings of Young Gautama," we follow characters in pursuit of fervor and feeling, eager to awake from their anesthetized lives. Awake into what? The future Buddha is uncertain but increasingly aware of the fakery involved in his palace life, which is micromanaged to prevent him from witnessing sickness or sorrow. The trees are sewn with silken, deathless leaves; the concubines are forbidden to shed a tear. Gradually the prince grows divided from his former self - haunted, like the man in "Miracle Polish," by mirrored reflections - until he declares his plan to leave the palace and set off on what will become the path toward enlightenment. This masterly novella contains the richness of physical detail and innovative imagery we've come to expect from a Millhauser story. What elevates it to the sublime are the trapdoors of emotion laid out along the surface of its calm, impenetrable prose, as when the king, hearing his son's declaration, "is startled to feel tears on his face. His tears shake him, and as he weeps he turns his face away from his son." Millhauser's flexible voice allows for many a quantum leap, from an Indian sage-prince to a mythical American hero. "You've all heard a tale or two about Paul Bunyan," begins "American Tall Tale" with the loose, hyperbolic brio of folklore, but the story pivots around Paul's "do-nothing dreamer" of a brother James. "Arcadia," about a deadly woodland retreat, adopts the gloss of a brochure even as it offers possible scenarios for suicide: "Guides are available to point out the most treacherous places." And in "Home Run," Millhauser channels a sports announcer as he describes in one long, virtuosic sentence the path of a baseball - "higher, deeper, going, going, it's gone past the moon" - that transcends time and space. Steven Millhauser is the author of 12 previous works of fiction; the most recent of these, "We Others: New and Selected Stories," won the Story Prize. Across such a broad body of work, thematic concerns and motifs tend to recur, but when compressed into a single collection, these recurrences can occasionally feel like lesser echoes of more realized stories. In "Elsewhere" and "Mermaid Fever," small towns are engulfed by restlessness, but lacking a vessel for that restlessness, "Elsewhere" drifts. In contrast, the sharp, often hilarious "Mermaid Fever" resolves itself around the body of a mermaid washed up on a beach, which inspires recklessness, curiosity and a unisex fashion trend in the form of a mermaid tail. "Voices in the Night" abounds with such marvels, the brightest being the title story, a triptych that harnesses the Old Testament tale of Samuel, who hears God calling him in the night, to a semi-autobiographical story of "the Author" as a young Jewish boy in his Connecticut bedroom, awaiting a similar call. What the boy-Author will hear, eventually, is "not Samuel's call, but another," summoning him toward a future spent "ministering unto the Muse." Brief as it is, the story offers a whole universe through the pinhole of a single memory. In an essay in The New York Times Book Review, Millhauser wrote of the short story's hidden motive, "the terrible ambition that lies behind its fraudulent modesty: to body forth the whole world." In "Voices in the Night," Millhauser gives us worlds upon worlds - wistful and warped, comic and chilling - that by story's end, feel as intimate as our own reflections. TANIA JAMES'S most recent novel is "The Tusk That Did the Damage."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 10, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
In his latest collection of intriguing, innovative, and evocative stories, Pulitzer Prize-winner 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.--Segedin, Ben Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Starred Review. 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 (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
