This ‘Penny’ Shortchanges the Reader

In the Penny Arcade by Steven Millhauser (Knopf: $14.95)

Steven Millhauser’s seven short stories are so carefully made that they seem overdressed. They sit stiffly on the page as if wary of wrinkling their velvet.

Several of them are written with a lush realism, shot through with weather, colors and states of feeling. Others are elaborate inventions with touches of fable or legend or magic. One is a triumph. None is without intelligence, and some possess quite a lot. But they all suffer to varying degrees from overarrangement and an evident striving for effect.

In the three realistic stories, Millhauser avoids entirely the chill and distance that pervade the work of quite a few of his contemporaries. The question is whether he has also avoided the outside weather that brings the temperature down and pulls the narrator away. An Ann Beattie, Frederick Barthelme, Raymond Carver or Tobias Wolff write in some kind of limbo season; late February, when winter has lost force, and there is no sign of spring. For Millhauser, it is always Epiphany.

The 30-year-old protagonist of “A Day in the Country,” a successful career woman, finds herself undone when a strange fellow-guest at a vacation resort tells her she looks unhappy. A paroxysm of weeping and a moonlight walk accomplish a cleansing; suddenly, she is older and in control.

Crisis of a Growing Pain

Two other stories also portray the small but telling crisis of a growing pain. In “A Protest Against the Sun,” a teen-age girl, clinging briefly to the safety of her parents on an excursion to the beach, is violently troubled by the sight of a young man who seems to challenge the sunny occasion by parading hooded in a heavy parka. In “A Sledding Party,” another teen-ager finds a different kind of safety threatened. The comfortable circle of her friends is temporarily violated when one of the boys, a buddy, suddenly kisses her and--as disturbed as she is--leaves the party and goes home.

It is hard to place these stories with their old-fashioned and highly polished sensibility. There is something dutiful and ponderous about them. For Millhauser, perhaps they are an effort to work out of the style of artifice he used in his 1972 novel, “Edwin Mullhouse”--an elaborate mock-biography of an 11-year-old novelist--and in the other stories in his new collection.

These display, at their best, a vigorous imagination. By far the finest in the collection is “Snowmen.” It begins, deceptively, as one more childhood recollection. There is a heavy snowfall, and the narrator and his friends venture out on the transformed streets and build snowmen. But the snow is so lavish that a magic enters into the work. Instead of conventional blobs with bits of coal for eyes, the snowmen have lifelike features and expressions, and assume extravagant postures.

By the second day, everyone is building snow prodigies. A snow string quartet appears in one spot; in another, three snow skaters with snow scarves flying out behind them. “The town itself had been struck by genius,” Millhauser writes. There is a snow fountain; a house with snow furniture and a ticking snow clock.

Decadence Sets In

It is a parable of the artistic frenzy, and decadence sets in. Snow trees and snow wildlife appear, and finally, snow trash: a snow Coke bottle, a snow buffalo nickel. “What had seemed a blossoming forth of hidden powers,” the author writes, “suddenly seemed a form of intricate constriction. It was as if those bird-filled maples, those lions, those leaping ballerinas and prancing clowns had been nothing but a failure of imagination.” With the thaw, nature and colors re-emerge, along with a vast sense of relief.

None of the other fantasies achieves this level. The longest tells of August Eschenburg, a builder of extraordinary clockwork figures. His artistry is seized upon, first by a department store proprietor who has him construct moving tableaux for his show windows; and later by an impresario who opens a theater for clockwork puppets.

The story is another artistic parable. Both the store owner and the impresario covet Eschenburg’s genius, yet they try to debase it by insisting that he turn out coarser and flashier work. It is not a particularly inspired parable, and although Millhauser’s account of Eschenburg and his creations is engaging, it suffers by essentially telling the same story twice over.

The title story uses the faintly worn symbolism of a child wandering among the animated figures in a fun house, and finding that a spirit is alive and at work among them. Their shabbiness, he discovers, is not inherent, but comes from the cynical and indifferent regard of the patrons who crowd through. It is congested and more than a little pretentious.

A final section, called “Cathay,” is a series of vignettes about an imaginary kingdom whose exotic customs are intended to be a kind of reversing mirror of our own reality. The debt to Jorge Luis Borges is apparent but it is not really repaid.

Millhauser’s inventions and paradoxes, while sometimes ingenious, tend to lack subtlety. More seriously, they lack muzzle velocity. Except for “Snowmen,” his toy parables prod at our sensibility without managing to penetrate it.