I guess it's more specific than Good Night Vermont, but still not as specific as Good Night Charleston. Also, I take issue with the fact that I guess it's more specific than Good Night Vermont, but still not as specific as Good Night Charleston. Also, I take issue with the fact that they seem to warn the moose about the car -- a real Mainer knows that it's the car that needs warned about the moose....more
There is this strong temptation to liken Millhauser to Borges. It's the style--the touch of magical realism--the way these stories are crafted as if tThere is this strong temptation to liken Millhauser to Borges. It's the style--the touch of magical realism--the way these stories are crafted as if they were academic papers on people that could never have lived, as if they were found journals of impossible experiments, as if they were mythologies transmuted into historical records. And it is not that this is too lofty of a comparison, but if Borges is strip-mining the subconscious then Millhauser is rooting around in the tailings--but even if he's salvaging from the waste, it must be a rich vein, for he's still far more successful than most other attempts in this style.
But as I worked my way through this collection, the comparison to Borges came later. The first comparison that came to mind was as I was reading "The Dome". My thoughts became: Well this seems like something George Saunders would write. But with all the humor sucked out of the irony, and all the wit drained from the parody.
The stories collected in Dangerous Laughter all appear to focus heavily on two of the major chords from late-twentieth century fiction: obsession with replication and simulacra; and a flavor of solipsism that seems a dry parody of itself. Not that these characteristics make the stories unenjoyable, or unoriginal. But they do not captivate. They set up their themes against a template of Oblique Universal Allegory, and then construct subject characters and settings at arm's length. It seems impossible to get close to anything in these narratives. (And this being despite Millhauser's own "Versimilist" obsession with inserting and describing minutia in all its banal detail.) The abstractions Millhauser engages just make them feel that much more antiseptic or detached. And for all the places where the stories succeed, it's this asymptotic relationship to the associable and relatable nuance, that is where they fall down.
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Further reading: • "The Illusionist", D. T. Max - link ...more
(I don't have it in me to review now. [Incentive to re-read?] Needless to say: this book was amazing. It would have been so easy to screw this up but (I don't have it in me to review now. [Incentive to re-read?] Needless to say: this book was amazing. It would have been so easy to screw this up but Lethem nailed it. He's become one of my favorite writers.)...more
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