Steven Millhauser’s Disruptions

Steven Millhauser. Disruptions: Stories. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023. 270 pp. $28 hardcover.

Having read all of Steven Millhauser’s published fiction, I sometimes torment myself by trying to decide which of his books to recommend as a way into his work, recognizing that to begin with one would be to miss — at least for a time — the delights of all the others. If a reader were to begin reading Millhauser with a book other than Disruptions, his new collection of eighteen stories, here is some of what that reader would miss:

~ Stories that explore the strangeness of other people's houses, one (allegedly) haunted, another the scene of an inconclusive nighttime encounter between a high-school boy and his girlfriend’s mother.

~ Stories that explore the way adolescence changes everything, and not for the better. “My hair was wrong. My walk was wrong. My face was wrong”: and the narrator smashes his framed yearbook photograph. In “The Change,” transformation takes the form of adolescent self-obliteration in a terrifying Ovidian metamorphosis.

~ Stories in which suburban realities — lawns, hedges, tree-lined streets — become increasingly strange, as residents drain their lives of color or climb ladders into the sky or let nature overtake their houses and public buildings (think Detroit, if Detroit were a tidy suburb) or grow accustomed to the presence of a town guillotine. And, always, there’s a narrator who speaks on behalf of the place (to whom?) and calmly thinks things through:

The post office, the library, the high school, the beach club, the guillotine, the bank, the movie theater, the Historical Society, the Presbyterian church, the new stop sign out by the hardware store — it was the town we all knew, the town most of us had grown up in, with its familiar monuments, its careful preservation of the past, its openness to reasonable change. A guillotine on the town green was beginning to seem no more remarkable than the new crosswalk between Vincenzo’s Drugstore and the Downtown Diner or the new post-office branch out by the renovated junior high. What really occupied our attention wasn’t the blade and the bloody neck but the new parking meters installed on two downtown blocks and the road-repair project that closed off half a dozen streets and produced traffic jams causing ten-minute delays.

~ Stories that develop in the manner of a metaphysical conceit, ingeniously exploring aspect after aspect of a given premise. The tour de force here is “The Little People,” a new expression of Millhauser’s fascination with the miniature, an account of a town that houses a separate community known as Greenhaven, whose residents are two inches tall. What kinds of work do they do? How do they avoid danger from birds, squirrels, unleashed pets, and children? How do they handle money? And what happens when a large person and one of the Little People embark on a sexual relationship? The story is told from the perspective of a large person, who finds the Little People ultimately and comically unknowable:

Sometimes we suspect that they are happier than we are, though this may only be because we cannot always see the expressions on their faces.

As with Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, whose turn-of-the-twentieth-century Grand Cosmo prefigures Disney World, Las Vegas, video games, Hudson Yards, and the Metaverse, the allegory here is overdetermined: Are the Little People the invisible labor force that sustains a local economy? Are they the unpowerful? (Recall Leona Helmsley: “Only the little people pay taxes.”) Is Greenhaven meant to suggest segregation in housing? Are the Little People an Other whose way of being the (literally) larger culture tries to emulate? (The high-schoolers in the story start a Shortness Club.) Millhauser’s fable is all the more powerful for its irreducibility to any one possibility.

~ Stories — all of them — that are endlessly inventive. The standout here might be “Kafka in High School, 1959,” which imagines Franz as an American teenager: hiding Four Great Russian Short Novels in his lap in AP English, looking at himself in the mirror (“His chin sticks out like an unclosed drawer in a lamp table”), staring at the “pale-haired goddesses” Bonnie Wilcox and Janet Pearson, always choosing the hat in Monopoly:

As a child he liked to try on his father’s hats, and now, at sixteen, he says that the hat is necessary because when you’re descended in a direct line from Miles and Prudence Kafka, who sailed over on the Mayflower and settled in Plymouth Colony, the least you can do is show a proper respect for the memory of your distinguished ancestors.

Here’s a quick test — though not a page-ninety test. Turn to page 215 and read the section of this story titled “Kafka Asks Himself What He Knows.” If you like what you’re reading, why not begin reading Steven Millhauser with Disruptions?

Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)

[The first two quoted passages are from ”The Fight” and “After the Beheading.”]