Steven Millhauser, "Little Kingdoms" (1993).

Sometimes when I develop a taste for a certain author, I decide to read his works over a long span of time, in the hope of making a good thing last. In the case of Steven Millhauser, circumstances have led me to make my way through a few titles in a relatively short period. While this has given me a clearer understanding of the continuity of his perspective, I think it may have also led to a subtle fatigue. I still feel that he is an interesting and talented writer, but I found myself continually checking to see how many pages were left in Little Kingdoms. However it's not the case that it contains inferior tales. Maybe Millhauser is simply better appreciated in the depths of winter. While his themes are accessible, his style is often fairly dense.

Regardless of whether or not Millhauser is appropriate beach reading, there is much to savor in Little Kingdoms. It contains three novellas of wildly divergent settings and approaches. The first is entitled "The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne". The titular character is a young man from Cincinnati who steadily distinguishes himself as a newspaper cartoonist. He gets married and finds his way to Manhattan in the first decade of the 20th Century. While he continues to turn out editorial cartoons and Sunday funnies, he labors into the night working on an animated cartoon distinguished by tedious precision and unfettered fantasy. As he does so, his marriage slowly dissolves. Still he manages to create an art that is truly out-of-time.

"The Princess, the Dwarf and the Dungeon" occupies the middle portion of the Little Kingdoms. For this tale Millhauser abandons his typical turn-of-the-century urban milieu in favor of medieval towns and castles. It describes a tale of palace intrigue between a prince, a princess, and a visiting noble. When the sovereign finds himself suspicious of his beautiful wife's fidelity, he decides to engineer a test. He urges her to offer herself to the noble (who happens to be his longtime loyal friend) and report the results of the situation back to him. Obviously this is a no-win situation all around, and the reader sees the eventual outcome as inevitable. The dwarf of the title is particularly treacherous, and perhaps a slight to "little people everywhere".

The final installment is "Catalogue of the Exhibition", and perhaps the most fascinating from a structural standpoint. It is divided by descriptions of various paintings the main character (Edmund Moorash) completed during his lifetime. The notes on the content and style of these works are supplemented by the kind of historical context you might see in curatorial statements. They gradually unveil a story of two pairs of siblings that spend time together in a rural idyllic setting, and the ramifications of their intensely formed individual bonds. Ultimately the developing plot takes on a tragic quality, as we see Moorash increasingly affected by the relationship between his artwork and the events of his life.

I was particularly struck by some of the formal experimentation of Little Kingdoms. As noted above with "Catalogue of the Exhibition", Millhauser has chosen to employ some atypical means to relate his stories. While I found "The Princess, the Dwarf and the Dungeon" fairly trite in terms of the plot-line, I was mildly intrigued by Millhauser's choice to have an anonymous townie as the narrator. He uses this device to examine the nature of folktales in general, with mixed results. Obviously "The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne" hews most closely to the traditions of Millhauser's most celebrated works. While I found the other two included novellas to be a bit contrived, I still enjoyed the author's consistent mastery of the language and his amazing facility for description.

Steven Millhauser, "In the Penny Arcade" (1986)

I have to admit being just a bit skeptical about book recommendations. Because of my ongoing project, I have refined my tastes to the point that I already know the type of stuff I want to be reading in the upcoming year. So generally I'm not interested in disrupting that continuity. Occasionally someone makes a compelling enough case to convince me that a particular author is worth paying attention to. Even so there are several layers of resistance that such a suggestion has to pass through before I honor it.

One of my sources that I generally trust is Bill over at Copacetic. He has guided me through the world of alt-comix during the last several years. Because I usually enjoy the things he sends my way, he gets the benefit of the doubt. I could create an quick list of cartoonists that I only know about because of Bill. But this post isn't about comics- it's about an author. On more than a few occasions, Bill has seen me browsing through the relatively small but impressive collection of literature that he stocks in his little store. And he's tried to turn me on to one of his all-time favorite authors, Steven Millhauser. It may be solely because of the imprint under which he is published (Pheonix of Orion Books Ltd), but his books were never quite intriguing enough to catch my interest. I admit this exposes a particularly American superficiality, but I am definitely vulnerable to marketing demographics. The packaging of Millhauser's works is plainly stolid. That may reflect the fact that the publisher is British. I'm not 100% certain.

When I was finally ready to take the Pulitzer Prize-winning Martin Dressler (1996) home, I prepared myself for an intensely dry read. That wasn't at all what I discovered. The award-winning book traces the rags-to-riches ascendancy of the title character. Dressler works his way up from cigar store stock-boy to hotel mogul in a couple hundred pages. Along the way his visionary dreams of creating an interior world within the confines of a quickly developing NYC proceed at a break-neck pace. There is a side-plot in which Dressler courts a pair of sisters, but I found that arc a bit contrived. What Millhauser succeeds best at is in evoking grand images through a series of very descriptive lists. He's obviously obsessed by systems theory, and this fetish is enough to sustain the discriminating reader's interest.

After I was done with his magnum opus, I wasn't sure if I needed to return to Millhauser in any expedient fashion. But then I found a couple more of his works in the remainder section of an independent bookstore in Shepherdstown, WV. I recently finished In the Penny Arcade (1986), a collection of short stories. The first entry is called "August Eschenberg", and the character for which it is named is very similar to Martin Dressler. Eschenberg is a man of extraordinary vision and imagination, and he inevitably struggles with social forces that tend to bring visionaries down to the mediocrity of the masses. American attentions are fickle, and tend to focus on the grandiose and sexy aspects of their various entertainments. A true thing of beauty will only engage the consumer mindset until it is no longer novel. Eschenberg's clockwork art becomes a victim of its own co-option, meeting a similar fate as Dressler's hotels. After concluding this story I thought I had a firm grasp on Millhauser's thematic range.

But I was pleasantly surprised at the emotionally resonant tales that followed. It turns out that Millhauser is perfectly capable of documenting the inner lives of his characters, even when they are confined to a more human scale. Stories like In the Penny Arcade, A Day in the Country, and The Sledding Party demonstrate that Millhauser is no stranger to the wonders of the heart. While his sometimes Dickensian prose belies the magical realism tucked away at its center, Millhauser's fictions here contain a deeper strain of understanding for the subtleties of memory and loss. I found both a deeper and wider facility in this writing that I had not expected after my initial reading of Millhauser. And that means I will be returning again soon.