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Enchanted Realm
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17143 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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12 / 1990 |
1,894 Words |
| Author
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Catherine Maclay
Catherline Maclay is a writer and editor who lives in
Berkeley, California. |
THE BARNUM MUSEUM
Steven Millhauser
Poseidon Press, 1990
220 pp., $19.95
Steven Millhauser is a strikingly original voice in American fiction. His first novel, Edwin Mullhouse, was published two more novels and two collections of short stories. Now is his late forties, he provides access to a world most of us lose touch with in early childhood. To visit - or revisit - this world of magic and illusion with Millhauser as guide is a thrilling and sometimes disturbing experience.
In The Barnum Museum, Muillhauser's most recent collection of short stories, the springboard into the realm of imagination is often the very ordinariness of daily life, which is at first familiar to the point of banality but soon arrives at something rich and strange.
"The Sepia Postcard" begins with the reassuringly mundane narration of its main character, who tells us that "I was tense, irritable, overworked…. Life was a foul farce with predictable punchlines; things were not going well between Claudia and me." The situation is easily recognized - a burned-out urbanite, not getting on well with his spouse, needs a vacation by the sea. "One morning he throws a suitcase into the back of the car and drives until, at dusk, he comes to the village of Broome." It all sounds very sensible, and so does he ("I expected no miracles; I wasn't young enough for dreams."), but in the little coastal town dreams do occur, in the form of visions gradually coaxed out of the isolation of his weekend retreat. Once these dreams and visions
... (1999 of 10975 Characters)
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