'Laughter' Dreams Surreally

Steven Millhauser seizes ideas and runs with them—until they’re out of breath and he’s out of words. The Pulitzer Prize winner’s new collection of short stories, “Dangerous Laughter,” takes the shape of alternate rewritings of the past, chilling renderings of the present, and dystopian predictions of the future.

The stories are strung together by the systems of thought and practice that Millhauser elaborates and explores to the point of either inevitable climax or collapse—and often both. Though Millhauser may expand the ideas behind his stories to points way beyond reality, his creations stand like fragmented prompts for the reader to consider rather than a set of answers neatly handed to her on a platter.

Millhauser’s characters wade through his stories thirsting to perceive a world beyond the limitations of their senses and their environment, like Plato’s cave dwellers striving to conceptualize an unseen world. The key to this—or, rather, the key to one of the many consecutive locked doors leading to this—seems to be that of painstaking observation: unlocking the imagination lies in seeing, hearing, and feeling the world to its fullest.

But Millhauser’s stories only nudge his readers toward certain themes that may or may not enlighten them. Divided under three headings, his stories are introduced by an “Opening Cartoon,” a story of a cat-and-mouse chase reminiscent of a psychologically insightful “Tom and Jerry” episode, with all its hilarity and absurdity intact. In this overture, Millhauser seems to be flexing his literary muscles for what is to come. With a temperament far more frenetic and edgier than any of the following stories, the opening cartoon seems to show off Millhauser’s descriptive meticulousness—a meticulousness that haunts the rest of his stories, without quite managing to be fully polished into brilliance.

The first chapter, entitled “Vanishing Acts,” deals in disappearances under some form or another. Odd and mysterious women spiral towards their disappearance with inevitable momentum as a whimsical voice looks back onto the summers of his adolescence. Clara Schuler, a shy and standoffish teenage girl, gains short-lived popularity in the eponymous “Dangerous Laughter.” She is gifted at hysterical laughter, a talent appreciated by her bored and entertainment-seeking classmates. In an attempt to retain this fading popularity, she laughs herself to death in front of the narrator’s eyes, “inviting [him] to follow her to the farthest and most questionable regions of laughter, where laughter no longer bore any relation to earthly things and, sufficient to itself, soared above the world to flourish in the void.” Millhauser’s accuracy with words paints a picture that strives to come alive.

Steeped though he may be in influences ranging from Jorge Luis Borges to Franz Kafka, Millhauser often remains strongly—even disappointingly—anchored in American soil. The second chapter, “Impossible Architectures,” features “The Dome,” an unmistakable dystopian portrayal of today’s consumerist society. In a narrative closely resembling historical essay, the story details the evolution of a large, transparent, protective dome, first over wealthy residences, then over middle-class suburbia, and finally over the entire country—a haunting extension of the shopping mall. “The Other Town” offers a wry commentary on the popularity of reality TV in today’s America. Residents of a small town regularly visit another that is uninhabited, identical to their own, whose appearance is updated by “replicators” every two hours, down to the levels of salt in each house’s saltshaker.

Millhauser’s confident storytelling imbues his collection with an ease and versatility that is unexpected considering the complicated nature of his subjects. His strong narrative voice, though perhaps a little taxing in its heaviness, provides welcome clarity, especially in the last couple of stories, in which complex pseudo-physics are described in intricate detail.

But it is “History of A Disturbance,” embedded halfway into the collection, that summarizes the predicament Millhauser’s whole project must confront. “History” is narrated by a man who gradually “casts off words” due to the dawning realization that they “blur together elements that exist apart, or they break elements into pieces, bind up the world, contract it into hard little pellets of perception.” The fact that the narrator is using words in the first place to tell his story is only addressed in the last paragraph, as a kind of apologetic wave to the form that had to be adopted in order to relate these events. Similarly, Millhauser faces the difficulty of expressing the absurd and the magical with the words of pedestian reality: it is difficult to keep the awkwardness of language’s inherent inadequacy from permeating his narration. As Millhauser’s characters are consumed by a desire to break beyond the realm of perception imposed upon them by their environment, so does their creator strive to transcend the limitations of language only to remain shackled by his medium.

—Staff Writer Anna I. Polonyi can be reached at apolonyi@fas.harvard.edu.