After I finished devouring "The Knife Thrower and Other Stories" by Steven Millhauser this summer, I immediately turned to his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "Martin Dressler" for dessert. Disappointingly, I discovered that this acclaimed novel was merely an expansion - and a dry one at that - of a quick character sketch from his short story "Paradise Park." What "Paradise Park" painted in Fauvist strokes, "Martin Dressler" etched into 200-odd pages.
In desperation, I abandoned the novel and reread "The Knife Thrower." It was a relief to slip back into the twelve parallel universes contained within. Each story is less a slice of life than a slash of life, oozing vivid description and rich detail. Millhauser's world is one that demands the reader to accept certain givens: Space on earth is infinite, carpets fly, summer nights never end. And yes, Albert has indeed married a frog. Yet for all the inventive moments in these stories, something darker lies just below the surface. Reading this collection is like finding a bug under your pillow - you can get rid of the bug, but every itch you have for the rest of the night comes from phantom insects taking revenge.
Unusual events are so commonplace that it becomes useless to fight the alternate reality in these pages. In "A Visit," a twentysomething narrator visits his old college chum - only to find that his eccentric friend has married a giant frog. Like the poor speaker, the reader too feels "tested in some fiendish way." After a few pages, however, this marsh-bred love almost skims the surface of normality. Given that, the reader will hardly blink when a five-inch automaton named Fraulein Elise captures the heart of a young man, or the citizens of an otherwise normal town descend into cavernous passageways just for the hell of it.
Throughout the collection, Millhauser questions the need for concrete answers. To him, readers too often demand an explanation for the unknown, when perhaps it is better to remain in the dark. And leave you in the dark he does. Readers are left to garner their own conclusions, not only about the plots, but the most incidental of details. (For example, through the narrator of "A Visit," the reader gets to ponder "frog-love, its possible pleasures, its oozy raptures." Not a particularly pleasant thing to consider, but one that just might give insight into this amphibian romance.)
Millhauser's writing is intentionally ambiguous, but nowhere more so than in the voices he uses to tell his wild tales. The narrators are a wide-ranging bunch, from a teenage boy on the brink of sexual awakening to a stunted hunchback in Nuremberg. However, five out of the 12 stories in the collection employ an unorthodox voice to relate events. Millhauser has a penchant for relating the tales in first person plural, using mysterious "we" narrators who speak for the collective consciousness of a warped and uncertain society.
The author designates himself the spokesman for the "others," but does not want to take sole responsibility for their opinions. Instead, he draws the reader into the heart of the story - placing even the most passive of readers on the jury. What makes these speakers even more off-kilter is the ambivalence with which they treat bizarre events.
In the title story, Hench the Knife Thrower arrives in a small town, cloaked with long-ago scandals and new promises. During his breathtaking performance (one night only), the narrators admit, "though we disapproved of the exaggerated effect of the lighting, the crude melodrama of it all, we secretly admired the skill with which the performance played on our fears. What it was we feared, exactly, we didn't know couldn't say." Before the evening is out, the undefined fear becomes real and blood is shed. However, the narrators pass no more judgement than to say "the more we thought about it, the more uneasy we became." Despite what they - and the reader - have just witnessed, only a vague sense of unease lingers.
Discomfort may linger longer in the reader than the fictional narrators, which is precisely what gives these stories so much impact. Millhauser creates situations that seem normal in context but eerie in retrospect. For example, the twin tales "The Dream of the Consortium" and "Paradise Park" play with expansion of physical space: A 19-story building houses a labyrinth of greed, and an amusement park grows a ghostly, subterranean level. Even more whimsical pieces like "Flying Carpets" and "Clair de Lune" build up a subtle tension. Just when the fluff ends and the foreboding begins, the author catches his literary breath before the trouble starts. Though the disastrous climax never comes, neither does a happy ending.
And Millhauser doesn't stop there. His spookiest tale, "The Sisterhood of Night," flips this formula of context and aftertaste on its ear. In the great tradition of American witch hunts (and especially appropriate for these post-Blair Witch days), he carefully crafts an aura of hysteria around absolutely nothing. Once again, the "we" narrators appear, this time to cast aspersions on "covens" of teenage girls roaming the town at night.
The tale begins by whipping up an aura of witchery, "erotic frenzy" and unnatural experimentations. In the middle of this panic, the Sisterhood's secret is slowly unfolded, revealing the girls to be far more intuitive than their accusers. Millhauser uses the hysteria of the narrators to drain the reader, leaving only a lingering sense of betrayal. The shadowy narrators have been exposed in all their weakness, and so too has the reader. Though the secret of the Sisterhood is there on the page, there is something deeper inside, still hidden, which continues to tantalize and infuriate the reader long after the story is over.
Short stories by accomplished authors are sometimes left in the shadow of their masterworks. Pulitzer Prize or no, it would be a shame to ignore Millhauser's work in "The Knife Thrower and Other Stories." Eerie, ambiguous, imaginative, this collection proves that short stories are art, not just fiction with a short attention span.
In "Paradise Park," Millhauser writes, "In the world of commercial amusement, success is measured in profit; but it is also measured in something less tangible, which may be called approval, or esteem, or fame, but which is really a measure of the world's compliance in permitting a private dream to become a public fact." To read "The Knife Thrower" is to enter the public fact of Steven Millhauser's private dream; though sometimes a troubling world, it is a captivating one.
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