A Fantastical Vision of the America We Never Knew

It doesn’t really matter that Steven Millhauser won last year’s Pulitzer Prize for “Martin Dressler,” an excellent book but not quite as excellent as his astonishing first novel, “Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954.” Like many great writers, Millhauser is obsessed. He has one story; he tells it again and again, and practice only makes it more perfect. Charles Sarabee, the genius behind a fantastical Coney Island-like playground, Paradise Park, in Millhauser’s latest collection of stories, “The Knife Thrower,” is an early sketch of Martin Dressler himself. Paradise Park itself, with its several levels of extraordinary underground amusement parks filled with beaches and live sea gulls, forests and spherical Ferris wheels, is the amusement park twin of Martin Dressler’s Grant Cosmo hotel.

What matters is that by grouping the dozen stories of “The Knife Thrower” together, Millhauser gives the reader a solid dose of Dr. Millhauser’s Fantastical Tonic, producing laughter, wonder, heady confusion and, best of all, a vision of an America we never knew.

Take the title story. The narrator draws us like a barker into the narrow space where “Hensch, the knife thrower, was stopping at our town for a single performance at 8 o’clock on Saturday night.” The usual tricks, performed with the assistance of a pale young woman, give way to the exotic. The merely dangerous give way to . . . .

But Millhauser is no simple grotesque. His territory is Adolescent Wonder rather than Adult Angst. His narrators live in a Chaplinesque, pretransistor, upstate utopia, midway between the Industrial and the Sexual Revolutions, sharing the semi-skeptical curiosity of the old Talk of the Town writers.

They take us walking along the thin line between clinical examinations of our fears and fantastical allegories in the styles of E.T.A. Hoffmann and Franz Kafka. In “The New Automatons,” Millhauser does the creator of “The Nutcracker” and “Coppelia” one better. Where Hoffmann created dolls so lifelike that one could believe they had the souls of humans, Millhauser’s hero creates a “race of automatons, the clan of clockwork. . . . They live lives that are parallel to ours but are not to be confused with ours. Their struggles are clockwork struggles, their suffering is the suffering of automatons.”

Millhauser’s cousins are the great myth-makers of our century--Beckett and Kafka. Millhauser’s America bears more than a passing resemblance to Kafka’s “Amerika,” where, as the hero enters New York and passes the Statue of Liberty “the arm with the sword rose up as if newly stretched aloft.” Sounds familiar, but isn’t she holding a torch?

These myth-makers are all town planners, creators of neighborhoods so nearly parallel to our own that they induce a shock of ecstatic electricity. The final story of Millhauser’s collection, “Beneath the Cellars of Our Town,” describes, in fact, a small town underlaid with a vast maze of underground stairways and caves lit by 19th century gaslight, through which the inhabitants stroll with the faithfulness that only a small town can devote to its monuments and its football teams.

“You who mock us,” his narrator says at the end, “you laughers and surface-crawlers, you restless sideways-sliders and flatland voyagers--don’t we irk you, don’t we exasperate you, we mole-folk, we pale amphibians?”

At times like these, Millhauser’s stories resemble those of the Italian myth-maker Italo Calvino, but painted at greater length and with a broader brush. Shorter, and Millhauser’s stories would become classic parables. But parables are biblical, and Millhauser’s stories are American. Their rhythm is an American rhythm, and nothing American--not even in a parallel America--is ever short.