Review: Steven Millhausers Dangerous Laughter By Geoff Schumacher, 3-19-09 In this day and age, there may be only

one writer left who can turn a short story collection into a best seller. You know who Im talking about, the guy with the glasses and the leer. The short story collection has fallen on hard times, victim of changing tastes and reading habits. Oh, writers, especially those at the beginning of their careers, are still cranking them out, but most of their stories are published in obscure literary journals. Consider that the New Yorker publishes one short story per issue. If you do the math, considering a couple of double issues and the annual literary issue in which a few additional stories are published, the magazine probably prints 50 stories annually. In terms of high-profile exposure for a short story, thats about the best a writer can do, and the competition is ridiculously fierce. But lets not abandon the short story just yet, because true masters of the form are still out there, producing mini-masterpieces that deserve a wide audience. Few would argue with the assertion that Steven Millhauser is among the elite. Ironically, Millhauser won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for a novel, Martin Dressler. But that was a fortuitous anomaly. Millhauser is, first and foremost, a short story writer, and a unique and brilliant one. His best-known story, Eisenheim the Illusionist, was the basis for the acclaimed 2006 film The Illusionist, starring Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti. Millhausers latest story collection, Dangerous Laughter, was published in 2008. The trade paperback edition came out earlier this year, complete with a promotional blurb on the cover touting its inclusion in the New York Times Book Reviews 10 Best Books of 2008. Its a much-deserved honor. Millhauser doesnt write short stories in which nothing much happens and the readers job is to absorb the meaning between the lines. This is not Raymond Carver were talking about. In a typical Millhauser story, a LOT happens, some of it strange, some of it downright science fictional. Millhausers usual modus operandi is to raise an everyday question and then speculate about what the most extreme response to it might look like. For example, in The Dome he creates a scenario in which people start erecting glass domes over their houses. This becomes a popular fad among the well heeled, but engineering, environmental and social challenges are encountered and must be addressed. Millhauser explains the evolution of the domes to fix problems and enhance the experience. As the domes improve in quality and

affordability, more people put them over their homes. Then, developers start putting domes over entire neighborhoods. Eventually . . . well, you can imagine the possibilities. In another story, The Tower, Millhauser reports on a community that decides to build a tower to heaven. After many generations of work, the tower actually reaches the floor of heaven. But the tower is so tall that a person living on the ground could not possibly climb all the way to heaven during his lifetime. So, families live in the tower, climbing, say, halfway up, with hopes that their children will have the opportunity to reach heaven. Over the years, some people who have spent their whole lives in the tower develop a desire to live on the ground, so instead of striving for heaven, they descend to the earth. As you might expect, these kinds of stories dont fit into the instruction manual handed out in creative writing masters programs. But the premises of the stories are fascinating to wrestle with. They are absurd, perhaps, but they speak directly to sociological impulses in modern life. One of the most affecting stories, History of a Disturbance, is told by a man who comes to hate and distrust words, so much so that he decides to stop talking. Naturally, his wife, colleagues and friends find this unsettling. The words I uttered seemed like false smiles I was displaying at a party Id gone to against my will, the narrator says. When he stops talking, he feels a great relief. Not to speak, not to form words, not to think, not to smear the world with sentences it was like the release of a band of metal tightening around my skull. This story reminded me of just how mindless and perfunctory most of our daily conversations can be, as well as the vapid chatter we hear on TV and radio. We could all benefit from less talking. I have barely touched the surface of Millhausers alternative universes. There are 13 stories in Dangerous Laughter, and every one is fascinating and mind bending and thought provoking. And if you pick up this book and find it as compelling as I did, Millhauser has several more short story collections to sate your thirst for more.