The latest collection of short stories from Steven Millhauser, CC ’65, fittingly begins with a cartoon. The cartoon, entitled “Cat ’n’ Mouse,” displays what Tom and Jerry would look like as Freudian psychiatric patients. The cat simultaneously begrudges and admires the mouse while the mouse contemplates the role of fate in their dynamite-exploding, anvil-crashing chases. Setting the tone for the rest of Dangerous Laughter, Millhauser transforms a seemingly trivial 2-D cartoon into a complex 3-D world that explores such topics as rage, destruction, and the inevitability of death.
Although he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for his novel Martin Dressler, Millhauser is perhaps most well known as the author of “Eisenheim the Illusionist,” the story on which the 2006 film The Illusionist was based. Dangerous Laughter deals with many of the film’s themes. The terrific collection is about obsession and its consequences—what happens when we use obsession as an outlet to escape the ordinary world and enter the realm of our own daydreams. Just as “Cat ’n’ Mouse” reveals the multidimensional world that lies beneath a cartoon’s flat exterior, each of Dangerous Laughter’s thirteen stories imagines a fantastical alternate universe. These parallel worlds are frightening and darkly comedic—yet all reflect the absurd and extraordinary elements that we find in our day-to-day lives.
Infused with fanciful details, Millhauser’s style is reminiscent of magical realism—many stories could easily fit in as chapters in a Garcia Marquez novel. The title story, for example, chronicles the “hilarity craze” that overtakes a small town: high school students throw “laugh parties” and hysterical laughter soon becomes a substitute for drugs and sex. That is, until a teenage girl, overcome by orgasmic laughter, dies and the town adopts collective crying as its newest trend. “The Dome” also recalls magical realism. Millhauser builds a futuristic world in which an entire county is covered by a glass dome. Having lost the distinction between indoors and outdoors, the inhabitants of this artificial space begin to feel as though their lives are “a collection of ingeniously constructed arcade games.”
The second story, “The Room in the Attic,” is the collection’s gem. The teenage narrator, Dave, is introduced to his best friend’s sister Isabel, who, due to an unnamed illness, is bedridden in her darkened room. Although neither ever sees the other in the light, they become infatuated with each others’ voices and occasional touches. Dave imagines a series of Isabels: blue-eyed Isabel, Isabel in faded jeans, Isabel so deformed that she is relegated forever to her dark chamber. It is a relationship entirely based in imagination, and it cannot last. Dave eventually understands that “Isabel existed only in the dark. Like a ghost at dawn—like the princess of a magic realm—she had to vanish at the first touch of light.” Representative of Millhauser’s favorite characters, Isabel is both real and unreal, a figure that morphs from a flesh-and-blood teenager to a creature of Dave’s mind.
The collection’s only misstep is “History of a Disturbance,” which is about a man who takes a vow of silence. The story offers an interesting analysis of language, but Millhauser embeds his philosophical musings in the context of an apologetic address to the man’s lover. His detailed examination of words is interspersed with romantic memories of long drives and days at the beach, and the combination does not quite succeed. Nevertheless, “History of a Disturbance” includes many beautiful sentences about language, such as, “Words hide the world ... bind up the world, contract it into hard little pellets of perception. But the unbound world, the world behind the world—how fluid it is, how lovely and dangerous.”
Millhauser’s words do just the opposite. They do not bind up the world but rather expand it beyond the boundaries of ordinary experience. They even give rise to new worlds, most of which are more lovely and alluring than our own. Dangerous Laughter is unique in its fusion of the magical and the mundane, of our dream worlds with our everyday world. A kind of literary illusionist himself, Millhauser transports his reader back and forth between reality and an even more thrilling fantasy.
