Voices in the Night is the latest collection of short fiction from Pulitzer and Story Prize winner, Steven Millhauser. The title artfully portends the collection’s dualism between the perceptible and the obscure. The reader will hear what Millhauser’s voices have to say clearly enough, but will also be left in an enchanting darkness searching for deeper meaning. Like much of Millhauser’s fiction, the work contained within this collection is both approachable and elusive, with narratives often opening in familiar settings before utilizing extremes as a means of delving into Millhauser’s preferred matrix of philosophical quandaries. Though the tales presented are diverse in style and content, most are firmly grounded in explorations of potent and often contradictory passions.
An amorphous sense of ennui permeates across many of Millhauser’s plots, but this is frequently counterbalanced by humor, perversion, mania, vanity, and desire. In the opening story ‘Miracle Polish,’ a weltschmerz-afflicted, middle-aged man buys the titular polish from a mysterious door-to-door salesman on impulse. Upon cleaning a mirror with the stuff, the narrator is treated to a reflection which subtly improves everything viewed in it with an ephemeral veneer of optimism. As the pseudo-parable shares thematic elements with the Narcissus myth, things go predictably awry when the narrator becomes addicted to this altered state of perception. The next entry, ‘Phantoms,’ remains rhetorically similar but structurally deviant, presenting a fragmented narrative made up of theories and case studies that offer various valid explanations for the ghostly aberrations who haunt the citizens of a small town. Through its overt inquiry as to whether the phantoms are products of temporal folding, beings of alternate dimensions, metaphors for nostalgia or broad allegories for cultural “others,” the story subtly challenges attempts at classifying its genre. ‘Phantoms’ is also the first of several “small town” stories that will appear throughout the collection. Some others which fit into this subgenre include ‘Mermaid Fever’ wherein the corpse of a beached mermaid warps the zeitgeist of nearby townsfolk and inspires all manner of bizarre behavior, ‘A Report on Our Recent Troubles’ wherein a pandemic of diverse ideologies all inspire theatrical suicides, and the allegorically vague ‘The Place’ wherein a small area seems to partially obliterate time and context in the minds of those who stand there. In each of these stories Millhauser’s tone manages to fluctuate between absurdity, anger, dread, and contemplative thought without ever breaking the flow or mystique of the narrative.
Some of Millhauser’s most potent writing can be found in his humanistic retellings of popular mythologies and legends. ‘Rapunzel’ delves into the conflicting passions and anxieties which drive the Prince, the Sorceress and Rapunzel herself, and maintains a tone of heightened sentiment and suspense while fragmenting its narrative. Millhauser’s take on ‘Rapunzel’ also touches upon the recurrent theme of isolated paradises begetting restlessness, and this is perhaps most thoroughly explored in the deftly suppressed prose of ‘The Pleasures and Sufferings of Young Gautama,’ Millhauser’s take on a piece of Buddhist scripture. ‘American Tall Tale’ serves as an entertaining addition to the American folktale canon and showcases Millhauser’s stylistic dexterity. The story of a larger-than-life sleeping competition between the can-do spirit of American progress, Paul Bunion, and his antithesis of a brother James, is humorous, not only for its content, but also the colloquial tone employed by its frontiersman narrator.
Other stories employ varying degrees of magical realism as a means of creating broader metaphors. One may read ‘Thirteen Wives,’ for example, as a surreal story of a man’s marriage to thirteen women with thirteen very different personalities, or as a commentary on the protean nature of the self via its telling of a man’s marriage to one woman over time. ‘Home Run’ is one sentence stretched over four pages, a device which structurally mirrors the impossible distance traveled by the ball the narrator describes. The final story, ‘Voice in the Night’ adopts a stream-of-consciousness narrative style evocative of Don Delillo’s Underworld, gradually creating a semi-autobiographical triptych of the biblical calling of Samuel by God, a young modern Jewish boy worriedly thinking about matters of race and spirituality, and an aged writer being called by the voice of the muse.
Voices in the Night finds easy comparison with the works of Jorge Luis Borges, Ursula K. Le Guin, Thomas Mann, Italo Calvino, Donald Barthelme, and Joy Williams, in both imaginative content and in literary quality. The collection is not only an enjoyable and thought-provoking addition to Millhauser’s oeuvre, but also a lesson on the flexibility of short stories. Millhauser presents a refreshing abundance of imagery, subject matter, diction, phraseology, and philosophical discourse that will likely amuse and inspire any reader who harbors an appetite for the offbeat. Like well-constructed poetry, Voices in the Night rewards contemplation, re-visitation and auxiliary reading with uncanny glimpses of sublimity and the deepest reaches of human longing.
Buy Voices in the Night (Vintage, 2015) here.
