BookStalking

The writer Steven Millhauser illuminates the shadowy nether-realms of human consciousness. Not the sinister, sordid stuff–but the stuff that we might not give a second thought to, the stuff that many writers don’t think to focus on as the main subject of a story. His terrain is often abstract or esoteric, tempered with prose that’s practically documentary in its sobriety.

 

For instance, in his short story “History of a Disturbance,” a man literally becomes apoplectic and finally goes mute when the absurdity of words, spoken and printed, aggravates then despairs him, ultimately propelling him into a vow of silence. (The story is written as an explanation and an apology to his enraged and uncomprehending wife.)

 

My favorite Steven Millhauser stories are the ones in which he hyper-focuses on a hypothetical shift in an otherwise realistic world. In these stories, readers don’t get a traditional plot, in which fleshed-out characters think and act and make events happen. The story “In the Reign of Harad IV” features a maker of miniatures who delights a king with tiny creations. The king becomes greedy for tinier and tinier things, until the objects become subatomic and, finally, imaginary. Although you get characters and events, the emphasis is on the themes of greed and obsession; the people and events are almost incidental. “A Change in Fashion” left me reeling with its inventiveness. In a sort of backlash against a world of low-rise jeans and exhibitionism, “concealment” becomes en vogue–and once again, Millhauser takes this idea to its extreme, writing of garments that cover all the skin, obscure the wearer’s shape, and finally become architecture that contains the wearer and renders her almost nonexistent. “The Invasion from Outer Space” is a convincing account of something (a substance, not sentient beings) coming to Earth. Instead of reading like an action movie, the story is tinged with the disillusionment of the people who feared and then found themselves desiring something more catastrophic, and climactic.

 

Many of these stories are narrated in the voice of a collective consciousness (of a town, for example). There’s a refreshing humility inherent in telling a story from this point of view, a reprieve from the self-consciousness and neuroticism that can come along with first-person narration. The focus stays on the playful philosophical ideas, without the complication of distinct, idiosyncratic characters.

 

I was thrilled to find all of these Millhauserisms in “Mermaid Fever,” a story from Millhauser’s new collection, “Dangerous Laughter.” (The story is also featured in the Decemeber 2009 issue of Harper’s magazine.) The story is simple: A dead and beautiful mermaid washes ashore in a small town, a bunch of scientists and doctors from nearby universities verify that she is in fact a mermaid, the town puts her on display in a glass box filled with preservative. Townspeople drift over to the historical society to gaze upon the mermaid, and her presence ignites the titular “mermaid fever”–first fashion fads, then changes in behavior and even sexual proclivities among the townsfolk. Finally, she disappears; the historical society claims that it could no longer properly preserve her so the mermaid was shipped off to the Smithsonian. Rumors and conspiracy theories follow, then relief that the object of the town’s collective obsession is gone. In her absence, the mermaid returns to her rightful place: the fantasies of the people she’d briefly dwelled among (in her vat full of preservative fluid).

 

From the very beginning–and before, as soon as I saw the title and an accompanying image of a mermaid painting printed on the first page of the story in Harper’s–I prepared to revel in Millhauser doin’ his thing: landing a fantastical premise smack-dab in an otherwise recognizably realistic world, details precise as documentation in some official log, the “our” narration, the moments of poetic transcendence.

 

But at a certain point, I hit a wall. It was when the collective-consciousness narrator began to describe outfits such as the “Mermaidini” and “Mermette” swimsuits. At first I thought, “Aha, he’s doing the thing he did in ‘A Change in Fashion,’ but… mermaid-style.” I decided to let this slide. But when the behavior and obsessions of the town’s denizens grew outlandish to the point of implausibility–a woman asking to have her legs sewn up so that she would be more sexually attractive to her husband, because he, like the other men in town, had developed a mermaid fetish–I found myself staring at the words printed on the page and wondering what they were doing in this magazine. It’d have been one thing if the story had a comic undercurrent (no pun intended) flowing through it–maybe then I could stomach notions such as the woman wanting the surgery, or the teenage girls getting scales tattooed over every inch of their skin below the waist, or the loner high-school girl who dressed as a mermaid then (very predictably) drowned herself in the nearby sea. The problem for me was that the story is told in such a grave tone. It doesn’t really allow even subtle humor to creep in. You read about these behaviors, and you’re supposed to accept them in utter seriousness, not as satire. (Although perhaps I’m missing something, and should have been assuming Millhauser has been writing tongue-in-cheek all along.)

 

The Sum Up: The beginning of this story delivers what Millhauser excels at, right up until this lovely paragraph:

“What no one had foreseen was the way she stayed in our minds long afterward. Day after day we returned to stand before the glass case and stare at our mermaid. She looked just to the right or left of us, or a little above, as if she were gazing off at a place we could never see.”

I was intrigued, excited to see how Millhauser would treat objects of fantasy or lust once they become too accessible or mundane, like dead butterflies in a collector’s case. But what followed after this point felt just a bit too expected, and I had this sense that Millhauser was rehashing approaches that have earned him praise in other works.

 

I understand that fantastical and satirical elements have their places in stories, that not everything has to be strictly realistic, even in “realistic fiction.” But I didn’t feel that the townspeople’s reactions made sense psychologically; as a reader, I never bought into them at all. However, for me this story was worth reading if only for its originality and Millhauser’s unique style. (Also, I liked touches such as the name of the town newspaper–the Listener, evocative of sirens’ songs.)