It took me to the end of the book to find a story that I really liked in Steven Millhauser’s collection, Dangerous Laughter.  Not that Millhauser is not a good writer; he is a beautiful stylist, a master creator of imaginary worlds well-rooted in the familiar, the mundane, the comfortable and ordinary.  He writes with a heaviness that is intoxicating, he is deliberately ornate (at times, labored and overwrought) and deliciously nineteenth century in cadence and structure.  But his stories seemed to me to always be a set-up to something more and in the end, nothing more appears.  His stories are the perfect background to a novel, to an epic family saga, but instead they are presented as stand alone sketches of moments in time and history.  I was impressed by the writing but untouched by the stories themselves.

What’s more is I grew annoyed with each passing story; they were repetitions on themes of accumulating trends (laughter, weeping, domes, miniatures, dresses) and quests (a better phonograph, a longer laughter, a more encompassing dome, smaller and smaller and smaller miniatures) and I found the sentences in the stories to be replicating out of control.  The descriptions also began to repeat; the suburban lawns, the maples, the beach towels hanging to dry, the wooded side of town.  I became almost dizzy in the repeated themes and there was nothing like plot or character to hang onto to distinguish one tale from another: they could have been all squished together (except for the last one) to create a monster novel of old-school suburbia.  Perhaps a novel about the strange girl in “The Room in the Attic”: I would have loved to follow her story a bit more.

Even as carefully and at the same time wildly imaginatively Millhauser writes his scenarios and backgrounds, I still craved characters and plot in his stories. Impersonal histories (not peopled with identifiable characters) by Millhauser are high art examples of a writing exercise but they are not stories that will draw me in, engage me, nor move me.  His stories “Dangerous Laughter” and “The Room in the Attic” did place unique characters within a plot and were very good.  But both stories still seemed to be just starting points for more: what he gave me in those stories was not enough.

Millhauser’s final story “The Wizard of West Orange” gives all: particular characters, a plot of creation and invention  (double entendre here), and a resolution that leads to a truth.  Millhauser at his best does what the invention in “The Wizard of West Orange” would do: involve us in the full experience of living with our every sense invoked and receptive. Millhauser has the power to write like that, but only when he engages us through creating distinct characters and plots alongside his stunning landscapes of the ordinary and the extraordinary.