Inside the "controlled madness" of creation

February 24, 2008|David Rollow

Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories
By Steven Millhauser
Knopf, 244 pp., $24

"Dangerous Laughter" is Steven Millhauser's best story collection. This baker's dozen sums up everything he has been driving at since the beginning of his writing career. Adolescents sulk, break down, and die. Other characters - artists and ordinary people alike - disappear except for the barest trace, or create works of art impossibly small (really invisible) or structures impossibly large (encompassing the world).

Several stories involve disappearances, not only those explicitly grouped under the heading "Vanishing Acts." A colorless young woman disappears, suddenly, it seems, until the narrator realizes she has been growing dimmer for years. "By the time she returned from college, the erasure had become more advanced. The woman glimpsed in town without ever being seen, the unimagined person whom no one could recall clearly, was growing dim, fading away, vanishing, like a room at dusk."

In other stories, artists vanish into their own work, or it vanishes from view. A miniaturist creates smaller and smaller work that becomes so finely wrought that it is invisible - it disappears. Harlan Crane, a painter and failed inventor, becomes a member of the Verisimilist movement. "What set them apart from other realist schools was their fanatically meticulous concern for minuscule detail." Once that would have described Millhauser, but now he jokes about it. The artist vanishes into his work: Crane steps into one of his own paintings and is never seen again.

The eccentric, brilliant adolescent aesthete who often figures in Millhauser's fiction states a theory of art that can be taken as the premise underlying much of Millhauser's work. There are no themes, he says, pointing out that what is central to the work of art is not its meaning. "The difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said the purpose of books was to allow us to exercise that faculty. Art, he said, was controlled madness. . . . He said that books weren't made of themes which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes. There were two kinds of people, he said, wakers and dreamers." Millhauser then proceeds to tell a story from which the sense of sight is literally absent, which takes place in the darkness of a bedroom where a neurotic girl is recovering from a breakdown. It is a story of preadolescent sexuality or adolescent presexuality, everything hinted and hidden. It is the most powerful evocation of adolescence that Millhauser has ever given us.