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Click here to read the story in its entirety on The New Yorker webpage. Steven Millhauser’s “Miracle Polish” was originally published in the November 14, 2011 issue of The New Yorker.
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It’s always a good week when Steven Millhauser is in The New Yorker. I actually read this piece on Monday but then was out of the country on a business trip, so only now am I able to write a bit about it. I’m anxious for your thoughts.
First things: I love Millhauser’s writing. This, for me, was not his best story by a long ways, but it’s still well written with a great eye for detail and rhythm.
The story begins with the narrator regretting that he let a rather worn stranger sell him some “Miracle Polish”: “It cleaned mirrors with one easy flick of the wrist.” The stranger is a bit surprised when this middle-class man buys the polish, but he is happy about it. Nevertheless, his mannerisms suggest something amiss:
“You’ve made a wise choice,” he said solemnly, glancing at me and looking abruptly away.
The narrator, having no intention of using the polish, put it away for a while. Then, one morning while checking his suit before a mirror, he noticed a smudge. It’s probably been there for a long time, but now that he has some polish . . .
It surprises him that the spot disappears so easily. Also surprising is the fact that now the rest of the mirror looks blemished, so he decides to polish the whole thing. Stepping back to examine the mirror, he sees himself reflected nicely in the mirror:
But it was more than that. There was a freshness to my image, a kind of mild glow that I had never seen before. I looked at myself with interest. This in itself was striking, for I wasn’t the kind of man who looked at himself in mirrors. I was the kind of man who spent as little time as possible in front of mirrors, the kind of man who had a brisk and practical relation to his reflection, with its tired eyes, its disappointed shoulders, its look of defeat. Now I was standing before a man who resembled my old reflection almost exactly but who had been changed in some manner, the way a lawn under a cloudy sky changes when the sun comes out. What I saw was a man who had something to look forward to, a man who expected things of life.
Filling his house with mirrors, the man is invigorated. He’s thrilled when he shows the mirrors to his almost-girlfriend Monica (“For years we had edged toward each other without moving all the way.”), who, like the narrator has never been particularly attractive, and whose reflection doesn’t change per se, and yet it does:
I had hoped the reflection in the polished mirror would please her in some way, but I hadn’t expected what I saw — for there she was, without a touch of weariness, a fresh Monica, a vibrant Monica, a Monica with a glow of pleasure in her fact. She was dressed in clothes that no longer seemed a little drab, a little elderly, but were handsomely understated, seductively restrained.
It may sound like it, but this is not a rearranged Dorian Gray morality tale. Still, kind of like Dorian Gray, perhaps the best thing about the story is the writing itself, for ”Miracle Polish” is not quite as powerful as Millhauser usually is and it’s even, sadly, a tad predictable. Still, a welcome tale from one of our masters.
I’ve been struggling for a while to figure out what to do for my October recommendations. Obviously October recommendations have to center around something haunting if not outright horrific — but all in a fun way. Sure, I’ve reviewed several horrific novels here, like Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (click here for my review; my opinion of it has grown infinitely since I first read it), but not many of these quite suit the mood because their horror isn’t that fun. At this time of year one could ceratinly do worse than read César Aira’s Ghosts, (click here for my review), but that takes place on New Years Eve, and the ghosts aren’t that scary. Patrick McGrath’s Asylum (click here for my review) is closer, but I prefer his book Doctor Haggard’s Disease, which I haven’t reviewed yet. When I think Halloween horror, I think Edgar Allan Poe and the like (I love Edgar Allan Poe). With this as my standard, only two books reviewed here would work as classic “ghost” stories with intelligent angles; they are two that I recommend fully: Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger (click here for my review) and Henry James’ great — no, magnificent – The Turn of the Screw (click here for my review). So, rather than do a recommendation list (as I have in past months – click here for monthly recommendation lists), I wanted to review what will be one of my favorite books of the year from an author who often reminds me of Edgar Allan Poe: Steven Millhauser’s new “new and selected” collection of short stories, We Others (2011).
Review copy courtesy of Knopf.
Actually, if I were to make a recommendation list for October (wink wink), I would have included Millhauser’s Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943 – 1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright (click here for my review). In that early novel, Millhauser displays his haunting vision of youth’s mysteries, and it is beautiful and horrific, both aspects common in these short stories.
Let me start by listing the “old” stories in this collection: from In the Penny Arcade we get “A Protest Against the Sun,” “August Eschenburg,” and “Snowmen”; from The Barnum Museum we get “The Barnum Museum,” “The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad,” and “Eisenheim the Illusionist”; from The Knife Thrower, “The Knife Thrower,” “A Visit,” “Flying Carpets,” and “Claire de Lune”; and from his latest collection Dangerous Laughter, “Cat ‘n’ Mouse,” “The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman,” “History of a Disturbance,” and “The Wizard of West Orange.” I will not be reviewing any of these stories here because I have each collection and the goal to review each at some point. However, if you’re new to Millhauser, this collection, with its selection of past stories, is a great place to start.
There are seven new stories in We Others: “The Slap,” “Tales of Darkness and the Unknown, Vol. XIV: The White Glove,” “Getting Closer,” “The Invasion from Outer Space,” “People of the Book,” “The Next Thing,” and “We Others.” Each is fantastic. We’ve already looked at two of them on this blog: “The Invasion from Outer Space” was published in the February 9 & 16, 2009 issue of The New Yorker and I spoke about it briefly here; “Getting Closer” was published in this year’s January 3 issue of The New Yorker, and it is still one of my favorite stories to appear in that magazine this year; I wrote about it here.
In this post, I’d like to focus on another of his “new” stories that I read last year when it was published in the summer reading issue of Tin House. (Incidentally, another of the “new” stories, “The Next Thing,” was published in Harpers, but I didn’t read it there. Also, there was another new Millhauser story, “Phantoms,” that isn’t in this collection but that was published in issue 35 of McSweeney’s. The man’s short stories are rightfully sought after.) The story I’m focusing on here is “Tales of Darkness and the Unknown, Vol. XIV: The White Glove,” whose wonderful title takes us back to those pulp collections of scary stories — what could be better for the month of October?
This is Edgar Allan Poe, in both ability and content, born a century later. Will, the narrator, is in his senior year of high school, and his best friend is the youthful, quiet — dare I say, delicate? – Emily Hohn: “It happened quickly: one day she was that quiet girl in English class, the next we were friends.” Will and Emily just fit together. There is no real romance (though there are buds of it, and of obsession); for the most part, it’s a peaceful and reliable friendship for both, which is welcome because Will says, “I’d spent the last year so desperately in love with another girl, so whipped-up and feverish, that even my happiness had felt like unhappiness.”
The story begins in the early autumn, and Millhauser takes us through the smells and sounds of each month until the climax the next June (one of Millhauser’s great abilities is to make the feel of seasons — often from a child’s perspective — come alive again). In the interim, Will’s relationship with Emily is threatened by a white glove she suddenly and inexplicably starts wearing on one hand. Neither she nor her parents will say anything about it.
But there was something else about the glove that troubled me, beyond the sharp fact of its presence. Ever since I’d become friends with Emily, I had felt an easy flow between us, an openness, a transparency. This restful merging, this serene interwovenness, was something I had never known before, something that reminded me of her porch in sunlight, or the night of the snow shining under the streetlights. The glove was harming that flow. It was, by its very nature, an act of concealment. Emily herself, by eluding the question of her hand, by refusing to reveal whatever it was she was hiding under the white cloth, was forcing me to think about her in a secretive way. It occurred to me that the glove was changing her — turning her into a body, with privacies and evasions.
My, but that’s a fantastic passage! It sets up the contours of Will and Emily’s relationship and how the glove begins to define how Will looks at Emily. He cannot help but wonder about this glove that she never takes off. Will’s obsession grows and warps. Emily is aware of this, saddened by this, but she still does not want to let Will know, perhaps in fear that it would ruin their friendship. The story develops slowly and nicely over the year as the white glove grows in Will’s imagination, and Millhauser uses it to inject tension into other aspects of Will and Emily’s relationship:
“Look at that,” I said, and lightly touched her forearm where the dim light lay across it. She looked down at her arm, where my two fingers rested. I moved my fingers slowly down her forearm until the side of a finger touched the edge of the glove. Slowly I lifted one finger and stroked the white cloth. It was softer that I had imagined. “What are you doing,” Emily whispered. “Nothing,” I said. I began stroking the part of the glove that lay over her wrist. Emily’s right hand descended only my fingers. She lifted my hand and placed it on her collarbone. With the fingers of her right hand she unbuttoned the top button of her shirt. Then she undid the button below. I felt the sudden edge of her white bra and the skin below her collarbone; my thumb touched the small connecting strap that joined the parts of the bra. I understood, with absolute clarity, that she was offering me her breasts in place of her hand. An immense pity came over me, for Emily Hohn, for the two of us sitting there like sad children, for the dark room and the spring rain, before anger seized me.
It’s a tremendous story, creepy, nuanced, filled with those haunting obsessions we try to repress but that explode into all sorts of ugliness. The entire collection — Millhauser’s entire ouvre — is worth reading. I chose to focus on “The White Glove” here mainly because the title easily ushers in the month of October, but each story has its own disturbances that suit the month well. Happy October!
One of my favorite books, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (my review here), was reported by Abebooks as one of the top ten forgotten Pulitzer Prize winning novels. Most of the books on the list were published between fifty and sixty years ago, but Martin Dressler was published only in 1997. Perhaps this is not a surprise to Millhauser who once told an interviewer, “I don’t anticipate the Pulitzer will change my life at all. I dare it to change my life!” Yet for decades Millhauser has been producing solid work, particularly in the short story form. I’ve been putting it off for a long time, certain that I would love the book, but I’ve finally read Millhauser’s also-neglected classic Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright (1972).
Let me start out by saying that this is quite the strange book — in a beautiful way — this biography by the young Jeffrey Cartwright about his young friend who died the moment he turned 11. It begins with a brief introductory note by someone named Walter Logan Wright, who first met Jeffrey Cartwright in the sixth grade. Apparently Jeffrey, at that time, was nothing special and had almost slipped from Wright’s memory when, ten years after their brief acquaintance, he came across this book. Wright’s introduction serves to blur the spotlight a bit. The biography, after all, is about Edwin Mullhouse, a young literary genius (according to Jeffrey) who wrote in the short time before his death, Cartoons. Yet Wright is more interested in the author of the biography, who, still young, has disappeared.
Meanwhile the search for Jeffrey Cartwright continues. I, for one, hope they never find him. Edwin’s novel, some will recall, was discovered in 1969 by the daughter of Professor Charles William Thorndike of Harvard: in a children’s library, of all places! . . . Professor Thorndike has called it “a work of undoubted genius,” and he is not a man given to hyperbole. I myself have sternly resisted the temptation to read Cartoons, knowing full well that the real book, however much a work of genius, can no more match the shape of my expectations that the real Jeffrey could, should he ever materialize. I shall probably succumb, one sad day. Meanwhile Edwin’s genius lives undimmed for me in the shining pages that follow. One can only regret that his work has proved less popular than his life.
There is a common complaint about this book: the prose is unbelievable; no child could ever write how Jeffrey Cartwright writes. As an example of this, here is how Jeffrey Cartwright describes Edwin’s Cartoons when he discusses it late in the biography (novel):
If, then, our first reaction upon plunging into Cartoons is that we have entered an unreal world, blissful or boring (as the case may be), gradually we come to feel that we are experiencing nothing less than the real world itself, a world that has been lost to us through habit and inattention, and that we are hereby being taught to repossess.
It’s true: that is not prose typical to a pre-adolescent. Perhaps it is not even possible for a pre-adolescent. That sentence becomes, then, a kind of gloss on Edwin Mullhouse the novel. Somehow Millhauser has managed to create an unbelievable character in Jeffrey Cartwright, who is unbelievably perceptive and sophisticated. Jeffrey Cartwright has managed to write a biography that, due to his age and experience, is unreal but, somehow because of this, feels very much like the real world, the real mind, however typically inarticulate, of these young struggling boys. It’s incredible.
Edwin Mullhouse is divided into three parts: “The Early Years: Aug. 1, 1943 – Aug. 1, 1949″; “The Middle Years: Aug. 2, 1949 – Aug. 1, 1952″; and ”The Late Years: Aug. 2, 1952 – Aug. 1, 1954.” We learn at the beginning, “Edwin Abraham Mullhouse, whose tragic death at 1:06 a.m. on August 1, 1954, deprived America of her most gifted writer, was born at 1:06 a.m. on August 1, 1943, in the shady town of Newfield, Connecticut.” Jeffrey Cartwright is Edwin’s neighbor, only six months (and three days) older. Yet Jeffrey’s memories of Edwin go all the way back to his birth (another bit of the unbelievable). Since Edwin’s birth, they were almost always together, and it seems Jeffrey treated Edwin as a subject even back then, analyzing his verbal development (“Adult speech, Edwin used to say, is ridiculously exclusive.”).
The Early Years is full of interesting looks at Edwin’s personality and perceptions. He doesn’t, in my opinion, sound that interesting on the outside. I doubt he’d be much fun, in other words. Yet Jeffrey Cartwright brings Edwin’s inner self to the surface with insights like this: “It is as if he assumed an earnestness in everyone in the world except himself — as assumption that revealed at once a deep self-disparagement and a subtle contempt for the imagination of his fellowman.” This is all part of Jeffrey’s goal, “for it is the purpose of this history to trace not the mere outlines of a life but the inner plan, not the external markings but the secret soul.” With that comes some of the secret tragedy of youth, which is nearly incommunicable to adults. Edwin’s mother, in particular, frets constantly because she simply cannot understand her son; here is one of her more innocent misunderstandings: “For the rest of her son’s brief life she would be plagued by his love of silence, never understanding that it was intimately related to his love of sound.”
As the book develops, the difference between Edwin and Jeffrey becomes more and more apparent. Here is an exquisitely written account of a “genius” who doesn’t seem like a genius much of the time. Rather, Jeffrey comes off as the genius. Jeffrey addresses this:
I wonder if I have sufficiently emphasized a major theme of this biography. I refer to Edwin’s naturalness, his distinct lack of what is usually called genius. He did not begin to speak at two months, or read at two years, or write brilliant stories at the age of three — or four, or five, or six, for the very good reason that he could not write anything but his name until the first grade. Nor was he lovably slow or backward in any way, with his talent standing against his stupidity like an emblematic lightning flash against a black thunderhead. No, he was only a normal healthy intelligent American child of the middle of the twentieth century, fascinated by toys and snow. Oh, he had what may have been an unusually strong attraction for books and words — an attraction amplified, perhaps, by the literary bias of this biography — but my own attraction was equally strong.
Of course, Edwin eventually writes Cartoons (and Jeffrey gives a nice summary), but for the most part he is a typical child, perhaps a bit more withdrawn. But one this that is special about Edwin is his youth, something Millhauser honors frequently in other works.
The important thing to remember is that everyone resembles Edwin; his gift was simply the stubbornness of his fancy, his unwillingness to give anything up. In the Late Years, when most of his contemporaries were already being watered down by a dreary round of dull responsibilities and duller pleasures, he alone refused to be diluted, he alone continued to play. Of course therewas the little matter of genius. But that is the point precisely. For what is genius, I ask you, but the capacity to be obsessed? Every normal child has that capacity; we have all been geniuses, you and I; but sooner or later it is beaten out of us, the glory fades, and by the age of seven most of us are nothing but wretched little adults.
But for Millhauser youth is rarely carefree. There’s haunting unrequited love worthy of Edgar Allen Poe when Edwin yearns for, and accepts the punishment from, Rose Dorn. Further, this book is full of death. We know from the title that Edwin will die, but he is not the only child who will die. Jeffrey himself has a darkness. Jealous of Edwin’s relationship with Rose Dorn (after all, it is distracting Edwin from his work), Jeffrey uses his more natural social skills to make sure that the other girls in the class will love him and not Edwin; and if he says he loves them all, how can Edwin show any interest.
And these girls are rather haunting themselves. One, named (coincidentally) Rose Black, is reclusive. Jeffrey writes her a poem:
Roses are red
Violets are blue.
I love a rose.
Do you know who?
Rose has an excellent (and passively pedantic) response:
This rose is black
And full of gloom.
Yet I too love.
Do you know whom?
Remember these are all young children, between eight and ten years old. It’s sometimes as if we’ve entered into an Edward Gorey book (which I’m all too happy to do). There’s a carnivalesque horror at times, and that aspect further underscores the burning mind of youth when a cartoon reality is perhaps closer to the truth than what we consider to be real.
The book constantly teases us about its darkest subject: the death of Edwin, the timing of which is too perfect to be coincidental. Well, I can say that the book becomes more and more horrifying as it goes on, and it’s a wonder any of us, as magical as it was, survived childhood.
In 2009, after reading all of the fiction in The New Yorker, I posted one massive year-in-review post with very brief thoughts about each story. In 2010, I posted an individual page for each story (though with one main index page), which allowed me to write more and also allowed others to leave comments as the year passed. I have not been particularly pleased with either approach, as much as I have enjoyed reading the fiction and sharing my thoughts. My 2009 method didn’t allow anyone else to share in the journey. My 2010 method was too much in the background of this site, so I don’t think some people who would have liked to share comments ever knew about it. So, in 2011 I am going to post my thoughts on this main page, and I’ll still use the same index page. There will be drawbacks with this method, too. One I see right away is that the discussion here will begin only after I have read the story. On the 2010 forum several readers regularly beat me to the stories but had a place here to share their thoughts. Also, this method will require more frequent posting on my blog’s main page, and book reviews (the regular meat) will be pushed down quicker, maybe before commenters are able to respond (for example, Eric Siblin’s great The Cello Suites will be pushed below this review after less than a day at the top). I dread that this will make this blog a respository of my thoughts only, but I hope there will still be plenty of commentary. All of this could be made worse since I have similar plans to start posting reviews of other short stories I read through the year (rather than only review collections).
I’m excited to begin the new year with a story by one of my favorites, Steven Millhauser, whose Pulitzer-winning Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer is sadly underread. Click here to read the story in its entirety on The New Yorker webpage. “Getting Closer” was originally published in The New Yorker‘s January 3, 2011, issue.
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Millhauser’s short stories are often quite short, and this one is no exception, but in just a few columns he manages to pack more than most other do in ten of the magazine’s pages. In “Getting Closer” we closely follow the thoughts and perceptions of a young boy who is excited because the day he waits for each year – the day when his family goes to the river — has finally arrived, almost. Here is Millhauser’s opening sentence.
He’s nine going on ten, skinny-tall, shoulder blades pushing out like things inside a paper bag, new blue bathing suit too tight here, too loose there, but what’s all that got to do with anything?
At the end of the story, we may come to think that those details matter quite a bit, not because they are important to the plot (they aren’t) but because those details are a part of this moment and this moment a part of this young boy’s life.
This is the beginning of a very simple story. The first few columns are a lush description of everything around them. The boy notices and relishes everything, and we are taken into his mind:
In the picnic basket he can see two packages of hot dogs, jars of relish and mustard, some bun ends showing, a box of Oreo cookies, a bag of marshmallows which are marshmellows so why the “a,” paper plates sticking up sideways, a brown folded-over paper bag of maybe cherries.
Still, though the day has arrived, the boy doesn’t think the day at the river really begins until he steps into the river. His older sister has already jumped in and is calling to him, but he’s not sure he wants to enter. Unlike the typical story, this is not leading to a drowning. The boy is simply struck by the realization that when he steps into the river, the moment will begin, and then it will be over: “He’s shaken deep down, as though he’ll lose somehting if the day begins.” I remember when as a child I first realized that if Christmas actually arrived that would mean it was close to being over. Consequently, I soon wished that the moments before would never end, even if that meant Christmas never came. As an adult, the peace of a vacation has often been endangered by the realization that, once began, it would soon be over. And each New Year is filled with hope, but subverted by the realization that with the passing of a year a bit of life is gone: my child will never be this age again — it’s over, the nine-year-old is gone forever.
However, in “Getting Closer,” Millhauser inflicts this child with all of this plus the terrible intimations of mortality. This child has “seen something he isn’t supposed to see, only grownups are allowed to see it.” This is, then, the day this young boy – who is nine going on ten, whose shoulder blades are pushing out like things inide a paper bag, and whose new blue bathing suit is too tight her and too loose there — realizes he and everyone he loves is going to die:
If he goes into the river he’ll lose the excitement, the feeling that everything that matters because he’s getting closer and closer to the moment he’s been waiting for. When you have that feeling, everything’s full of life, every leaf, every pebble. But when you begin you’re using things up. The day starts slipping away behind you. He wants to stay on this side of things, to hold it right here. A nervousness comes over him, a chilliness in the sun. In a moment the day will begin to end. Things will rush away behind him. The day he’s been waiting for is practically over. He sees it now, he sees it: ending is everywhere. It’s right there in the beginning. They don’t tell you about it. It’s hidden away in things. Under the shining skin of the world, everything’s dead and gone.
The ending, after that very peaceful beginning, is a rush of emotion. It’s a brilliant move by The New Yorker to place this story in the issue that would straddle the death of one year and the birth of another. The story’s concept itself may not be original, but in Millhauser’s hands the detail, the pacing, the structure make for a very strong short story well worth the time it takes to read and reread.
I first read this book about a decade ago, and I didn’t like it much. I thought it was boring. Well, if nothing else, let this post be about second chances and about how our situation in life may well be the real reason we fail to appreciate a book. I decided a few nights ago to reread it to review it in anticipation of this year’s Pulitzer (Millhauser has a book of short stories that was selected by The New York Times as one of 2008′s five best books of fiction, so he is a contender this year too). When I started it this time I was thinking, let’s just give it a few pages. I was immediately drawn into the world of Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (1996; Pulitzer). I’m sure one of the reasons I appreciate it more is that I’m a much better reader now than I was then. I feel more of the subtlety. Also, my experience with people and with settings has increased my ability to connect with the book. The first time I read it all of the details bringing New York City of 1880 to life failed to grab me; this time, now that I roam those same streets, it was striking!
Millhauser’s evocation of old New York was, well, as I said, striking. The past seemed so real it is haunting; or, rather, I felt as if I were there haunting the past. Here is an early description that was one of the main reasons I kept reading past the first few pages:
Martin’s mother almost never allowed him to cross Broadway, where great red or yellow omnibuses pulled by teams of two horses came clattering by; once she had seen a man hit by the wheel of an omnibus, and another time she had seen a horse lying in the middle of the street. She herself shopped at the less expensive stores on Sixth Avenue, where high in the air the Elevated tracks stretched away like a long roof with holes in it for the sun to come through. But the line of stores and hotels on their side of Broadway between the two big shady squares, Union and Madison, was almost as familiar to Martin as his own street. At Madison Square Park his mother liked to sit on a wooden bench under the trees and look up at the big seven-story hotels, before heading back to their rooms over the cigar store . . . .
I’d love to know if this passage is intriguing to people who have never been to New York City. Imagining that place bustling, under elevated tracks, 120 years ago and linking that to the bustle that is New York today really filled me with curiosity about the city. In a way, this book is a preface to the twentieth century. Here we see the transition from small to large to gigantic. Buildings that couldn’t rise above ten stories can suddenly go up twice—no—three times as high. Fantastic engineering feats, like the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, inspire others to think big and execute their plans, all of this before severe zoning and environmental and safety restrictions. This is the life of Martin Dressler, who started out helping in his father’s cigar store, a modest, conservative establishment. Martin’s first big dream is to create an interesting window display. Millhauser dives deeply into the soul of this dreamer, however, and we watch as his imagination, never satisfied, forces him to attempt larger and larger feats. From the cigar store, Martin finds his way into a job at a nearby hotel. There he works his way up, building capital, until he can open his own cigar booth (which sells cigarettes, something his father would never do) in the hotel lobby. He continues his jobs in the hotel too, absorbing the atmosphere, learning the system, allowing his imagination to run unrestrained.
No, what seized his innermost attention, what held him there day after day in noon revery, was the sense of a great, elaborate structure, a system of order, a well-planned machine that drew all these people to itself and carried them up and down in iron cages and arranged them in private rooms.
Soon his successful enterprise takes him higher and higher until he attempts to build a structure that houses the universe itself.
You are justified to think that as Martin’s dreams grow larger, the book itself would have a hard time sustaining this. However, the more complex and large Martin’s ideas get, the more complex the book’s structure gets—the better the book gets. Indeed, the book’s structure is a representation of what it describes. Millhauser anchors the fever-dream imaginings (all told with exceptional, exotic and attractive detail, like a sophisticated advertisement—another layer in this book) with intricate relationships, and he has the ability to navigate the complexities often felt but not understood. Through his excellent and ambitious craftsmanship, Millhauser infuses this structure with life rare in fiction. He can be lofty, taking on America itself, or he can be delicate and intimate, like when a young girl gives a young Martin “a small heart-shaped gold locket, still warm from being clutched in a fist.” This is adroit writing; by avoiding the obvious “her fist” and opting for “a fist,” Millhauser actually makes us focus on the moment and the action itself. The book is filled with moments like this. They are powerful and, though never expressly referred to again, haunt the pages just as the past does.
And as the structure and dreams get more complex, so do the relationships. Which brings me to another thing Millhauser does exceptionally well: trusting the reader. The book is complex yet controlled to the minute detail. And through it all Millhauser feels no need to spell everything out to us; he trusts us to follow him, picking up the details. This is particularly important when delving into the many relationships in the book. When Martin is moderately successful, he takes up boarding at a hotel where the Vernons—a mother and her two daughters, both around his age—are also residing. Strangely, yet believably and not distastefully, Martin feels as if he is married to all three women. On the periphery is the hotel maid, Marie Haskova:
His little Sunday morning friendship with Marie Haskova, with its air of faint ambiguity, as if her were concealing from the Vernons a secret mistress, in one sense simplified his relation to them, for whatever he felt for the three Vernon women had nothing to do with secret liaisons. The Vernons, all three of them in a kind of lump, could be imagined only as a wife. And yet in another sense Marie Haskova confused his feelings for them, for it was as if the vague desire aroused by the Vernon women were seeking an outlet in young Marie Haskova. But there were deeper confusions, elusive connections that he could barely sense. There was something unspoken between him and Marie Haskova, something secretive and unacknowledged—but weren’t the secretive and the unacknowledged the very sign of his union with Caroline Vernon?
Caroline Vernon is destined to become Martin’s ghostly wife. Martin’s true friendship will develop with the other daughter, who will become his business confidant. These relationships portray interesting aspects of marriage and the rise of women, still only slightly, up the ladder of equality. They also exemplify another aspect of modern life: the transition of some intimate events (like dinner) into large social events, where everyone gathers around in a large room inside a large building inside a large city.
Structure and identity are important aspects to Millhauser’s novel; indeed, they are as intriguing to me as his reportage of old New York. Playfully, Millhauser utilizes themes that seem connected to intriguing theory, particularly Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. While told very realistically, the book is filled with quasi-existence and mock authenticity. Sometimes Martin only knows how he feels by looking in a mirror. Many objects are reproductions or representations of something else. He hires “live actors [to] impersonat[e] wax works.” Objects are given meaning through advertising and placement. Life is given meaning through objects. And yet, it’s not so simple.
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