The writer Steven Millhauser relishes the magical, but he also has a soft spot for the humdrum: the sound of a lawn sprinkler, the sight of a basketball left on a driveway.
and Angela Carter at other times, even of Nabokov once in a while. What sets him apart from other writers these days is that he’s a fabulist of a particular sort: his stories take place, for the most part, neither in the real world nor in one that’s wholly fantastical but someplace in between.
In the new collection, Millhauser has it both ways. One of the longer stories takes place in a Connecticut town where the inhabitants of a certain neighborhood are just two inches tall. Some of them have jobs in—what else?—nanotechnology, and others work in the homes of their fellow-townspeople, removing lint from clothes, polishing eyeglasses, scouring attics and cellars for ants and mouse droppings.
In “Green,” a fad for grassless back yards sweeps the town. People rip up their lawns and replace them with bricks and cobblestones. Next, the trees start to go, and by Labor Day the town is stripped of green. Then, in the spring, the pattern is reversed. First one family and then another starts planting bushes and reseeding the yards, and then, of course, this being a Millhauser town, everyone goes too far.
All these stories are about transcendence—about a wish to get away from the worlds we inhabit and the limitations they impose on us. Sometimes this urge has an explicitly religious dimension. A minister in “Ladders,” for example, denounces the ladders as dangerous metaphors, “materialistic perversions of spiritual striving.
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