In a universe of overused adjectives, there’s one you rarely hear: 'spellbinding.' Perhaps that’s because very little holds our rapt attention as if by some cold magic. The best Steven Millhauser stories, as fans of his many collections know, do exactly this. They cast a spell from which there is no release. But the sorcery chooses certain victims. I was thrown when my brother confessed he found 2008’s Dangerous Laughter a puzzling antique, its narratives at once too fanciful and inscrutable.

An explanation for this divisive quality derives from a fellow fan, who suggested to me that Millhauser writes about being overly sensitive to the world. I couldn’t agree with her more, especially as his latest collection, Voices in the Night, reinforces her theory. 'The Wife and the Thief' unfurls with a slow Gothic dread worthy of Edgar Allan Poe himself, generated by nothing more strange than suburban paranoia: a woman finds herself sleepless next to her peacefully slumbering husband in bed and imagining (or not imagining) a cat burglar prowling about their home. But which condition does she really desire – being correct and therefore threatened, or delusional and therefore mad? The chill of the story is how she tries to reconcile both outcomes into a single, ungraspable reality.

The concluding title story, meanwhile, interweaves the Old Testament tale of Samuel hearing the voice of god when others could not – there’s that sensitivity again – with acute reflections on contemporary mysticism and the problem of a 'higher calling.' (Including, ahem, storytelling.) Again the terrible keenness of perception, always rendered by Millhauser in a crisp, stately style that resembles the bracingly fine autumn days peppered throughout his fiction, is seen as a crucial counterpart to fabulation. He is a noticer, and escapes his own endless observation by succumbing to the fatal temptation of books.

'The boy in Stratford lying awake at night because of a story in a book,' Millhauser writes. 'What’s a story? A demon in the night. He wants to protect the boy, warn him before it’s too late. Don’t listen to stories!'

As intimate as Millhauser often gets – he has a gift for whispering, gossipy and even high incantatory tones, rendering the cosmic baseball announcing of 'Home Run,' for example, as the best run-on sentence you’ll ever encounter – this focus on the semi-consciousness of night feels quite personal. And it comes along with a new-found taste for suicide. 'A Report on Our Recent Troubles' invokes the small-town, first-person plural that gave shape to one of Millhauser’s late psychological triumphs, 'The Slap,' to describe a seemingly contagious rash of teen suicides that become ever more baroque in a fever of competition. 'Arcadia,' by contrast, adopts the calm, calculating brochure language of a pristine wilderness resort, euphemistically hinting that it’s the perfect place to off yourself:

The fourteen gorges that cut through our retreat offer an abundance of natural beauty and unique opportunity. Steep, rocky cliffs plunge some three hundred feet toward fast-moving rapids. The cliff-tops are dangerous and only partially protected by old and damaged railings.

You get the idea. But, true to form, Millhauser carries the concept beyond its logical conclusion and into a place of siren dreams. These dual visions of self-annihilation, as either a hormonal fad or a vaguely corporate luxury – but somehow romantic in either sense – disturb in the extreme.

These are the departures. You’ll also find his usual doses of medieval frillery ('Rapunzel,' an exceedingly subtle, sexualised revision) and vintage Americana: both 'American Tall Tale' and 'Coming Soon' subvert and attack a national pride in swarming industry, the former with an admiring portrait of Paul Bunyan’s epically lazy deadbeat brother, the latter with a Twilight Zone-worthy panic about a city continually transformed and remodelled, to the point at which it is never recognisably itself, so incessant is the drive toward concrete 'improvement.' It’s a clear companion piece to Martin Dressler, Millhauser’s Pulitzer-winning novel, which follows a prime architect of Manhattan’s 20th-century modernity until the forces he sought to master leave him behind as well.  

Millhauser’s great subject, however, may be the indefinable. I keep returning to his books, I’m sure, because they articulate the uncanny and unspeakable with a lush, heartbreaking clarity. All the same, it’s natural for him to plunge the hadal depths of ambiguity. 'Elsewhere,' 'Phantoms,' 'Miracle Polish' and 'The Place are variations on the recurring motif of Voices, describing people not quite plagued by the barely-seen and possibly-imagined but nonetheless in thrall to its shadowy power, the intuition of a ghostlike world that intersects our material plane. A passage from the last of these, which concerns a geographic nexus unremarkable except in that it unaccountably obsesses the local citizenry:

Some call it the Great Revulsion. That’s when you suddenly turn against the Place, for no reason you can understand. The stone walls seem to give you a hostile stare, the sky is a hand pushing against your neck. In the stillness you can almost hear voices calling to you from the town. And so you hurry back to the world below, where you laugh with friends, drive out with your wife and kids to the picnic tables at Burrows Park, plan vacations to the seashore. You can’t understand why you ever wasted your precious time at the dead top of a boring hill, while life was swirling down below.

The cyclical and fluid forms of experience hinted at here achieve major fruition in the two stories I’d argue stand as the most curious of the bunch. 'The Pleasures and Sufferings of Young Gautama' is a lengthy Far East fantasia about a young prince rejecting the artifice of the perpetually happy and deathless palaces his father the king imprisons him within, possibly achieving enlightenment in the process. Odder still is 'Thirteen Wives,' an earnest interrogation of functional polyamory: the narrator introduces us to the multiple and widely varying loves of his life, laying out in great detail what makes each essential to his wellbeing, as well as how he is to theirs. Even so, he’s plagued by the inkling that it’s all too much – or not enough.   
             
Anyone who has ever felt stalked by apparitions or emotions that refuse to fully reveal themselves will detect a spinal shiver, and it doesn’t take any grand sense of dissociation to immerse oneself in this close, haunted mindset. 'Elsewhere' makes use, like 'Mermaid Fever' and 'A Report on Our Recent Troubles,' of social infection and hysteria: a singular incident sparks a chain reaction whose momentum cannot be checked, only finally exhausted, collapsed and submerged in memories that will never be entirely trusted. So it is with Millhauser’s work, which remains that of a true master. Once we put it down, supposedly freeing ourselves of its winding passages, we begin to nurse a troubling doubt of all we believe we’ve read. Did he actually write this or that searing line, or did we simply imagine it?

Miles Klee is an editor at the Daily Dot. He is the author of the novel Ivyland and a collection of stories, True False.

Tweet

Find a Local Independent Bookshop from which to Purchase this Book

Please enter a postcode or a city in the UK