'Dangerous Laughter' by Steven Millhauser
BOOK REVIEW
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist turns to stories about disappearing.
Dangerous Laughter
13 Stories
Steven Millhauser
Alfred A. Knopf: 246 pp., $24
STEVEN MILLHAUSER'S "Dangerous Laughter" comes billed as a book about obsession, but the 13 stories here deal more with disappearance, "the real division between the visible world and that other world." It's a running theme, the way reality can slide and we may truly know ourselves only in darkness, along the border between what we take for granted and what we can never take for granted, the elusive shadows at the edges of our lives.
This has long been a fascination of Millhauser's; his first novel, "Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright" (1972), raises unsettling questions about the line between genius and adulation, while his Pulitzer Prize-winning "Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer" (1996) frames 19th century New York as a phantasmagoric landscape, where an Alger-esque protagonist builds a grand hotel in which he replicates the textures of the outside world.
"Dangerous Laughter" is marked by similar intentions: One story, "A Precursor of the Cinema," reads like a corollary to "Martin Dressler," and others revisit the suburban settings evoked in "Edwin Mullhouse." In the tension between those elements we see the push and pull that has motivated much of the author's career.
Millhauser is often compared to Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, and that's fair enough, I suppose. Like them, he seeks the unsettling connection, the spectral turn by which the simplest reality becomes alien and unknown. What distinguishes him, however, is a certain homespun quality, an American faith in the very surfaces he means to strip away.
In the title story, teens get together for laughing parties, or "laugh clubs," where they tickle each other into hysteria as a way of heightening their lives. "We wanted to live -- to die -- to burst into flame -- to be transformed into angels or explosions," Millhauser writes. "Only the mundane offended us, as if we secretly feared it was our destiny." Yes, it's a story about disassociation, but disassociation of a common sort.
