Disappearing acts

For Millhauser, the key is language, which can bridge the gap between familiar and unfamiliar and draw us in. At the same time, he knows that words can fool us, that language both illuminates and obscures. Nowhere is this made more explicit than in "History of a Disturbance," about a man who stops speaking after realizing that words "harmed the world." As he explains: "My vow of silence sought to renew the world, to make it appear before me in all its fullness. I knew that every element in the world -- a cup, a tree, a day -- was inexhaustible. Only the words that expressed it were vague or limited."

Yet despite the acuity of such a statement, it also highlights what seems an unresolved contradiction the more we read of "Dangerous Laughter." It's not just that books are made of words, although that's part of it; the narrator of "History of a Disturbance" has no choice but to use them to describe his renunciation of language, after all.

More to the point, what's at issue is the balance between words and narrative, between the surfaces of Millhauser's writing and what goes on underneath. When fully developed, his work is among the most thought-provoking I've encountered, deftly layering character, emotion and intellect, beautiful and profound. Such longer efforts as "The Room in the Attic" or "The Wizard of West Orange" are like mini-novels, opening our imaginations, telling a story and commenting on it all at once.

There's too much here, though, that reads like filler, too many short takes that go nowhere, framed around a gimmick or a conceit. "The Dome" posits an enormous enclosure built over the United States as a way of commenting on "landscape as style," the abolishment of nature, but the larger point falls flat beneath the story's overreaching conceit. "The Tower," about a literal Tower of Babel, struggles under the weight of its own construction, ultimately collapsing as its subject does. These pieces are stilted, with no room for engagement, no development or growth. This is what happens when language cuts itself free of character, when a writer tries to use fiction not to get at situations but at ideas.

Of course, even at its most elusive, "Dangerous Laughter" is a provocative collection, suggesting that, in our own slow fade toward oblivion, some kind of discovery may be made. Such a notion marks nearly every story here, from the silence of "History of a Disturbance" to "The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman," with its insistence that we disappear "gradually, over the course of time." What Millhauser has to offer, then, are glimpses, dreamscapes. "A book," says one of his characters, "is a dream-machine." That's it precisely, a dream machine in which, like all dream works, we must often be obliterated if we are to be found.

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david.ulin@latimes.com