The town and the city
Steven Millhauser wants to startle us, and with his latest collection, “Voices in the Night,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning author does just that. Millhauser’s 16 wondrous stories re-examine fairy tales, folktales and, not least of all, our shared perception of Small Town, USA.
In one such town, a door-todoor salesman unloads a bottle of mirror cleaner to a grumpy, gullible customer. After using it, the man notices “a freshness to my image, a kind of mild glow that I had never seen before.” This mystery polish soon dominates the man’s every waking moment until he’s “in the grip of an obsession.”
Fantastic incidents like this are common in Millhauser’s little towns. Each has a Main Street, town newspaper and quaint boutiques. And each must confront its own bizarre event.
Phantoms plague residents in one town. A mermaid washes ashore in another. An “epidemic of suicide” sweeps through yet another town, where “the act of dying became an increasingly elaborate art.”
Half of the collection imaginatively revisits tales we’ve been familiar with since childhood. Few authors would dare retell the story of Rapunzel, but Millhauser attempts it. In his hands Rapunzel and her prince are saddled with worry and guilt. In “American Tall Tale,” Paul Bunyan engages in a sleeping contest with his brother, James, a “do-nothing dreamer.”
Millhauser is unique among contemporary short-story writers. He’s unconcerned with topical subjects or what’s trendy. Instead, his eerie, atmospheric tales remind us of Edgar Allan Poe and the brothers Grimm. Millhauser’s stories feel as if they’d been composed in a distant era, as though they’ve been magically delivered from the past to mystify and delight.
The anxiety of city life is a quality frequently found in Jonathan Lethem’s fourth story collection, “Lucky Alan.” Underscoring the book’s jittery, metropolitan mood are dive bars, cramped apartments and the racket of jackhammers.
In “Procedure in Plain Air,” cafe-dwelling Stevick witnesses a work crew — “[t]wo men in jumpsuits” — deposit a bound prisoner into a hole in the asphalt. Stevick, simply enjoying his morning coffee, soon finds himself complicit in this surreal captivity.
Lethem enjoys toying with his characters. He likes placing them in sketchy situations. Take Kromer, from “The Porn Critic,” who works at Sex Machines, an “erotic boutique” whose “interior and stock had been painstakingly derived from that of a famous San Francisco shop.” To his friends, Kromer is a “saint of degeneracy.” His job lends him some edgy cred, but the gig also destroys any chance for romance.
While lively and often absurd, Lethem’s nine stories can be somewhat uneven. Five of them, originally published in the New Yorker, brilliantly comment on the disquiet of modern-day existence, but the remaining four seem tossed in to bulk up the slim book.
The clipped, subject-verb sentences in “Traveler Home” make this story read like a tiring writing exercise: “Traveler alone. Traveler pining. Traveler waking, turns out dreaming.”
Reader irritated. Reader moves on.
Lethem’s most satisfying story, “The King of Sentences,” is a hilarious send-up about two creative-writing-MFA types mesmerized by a reclusive author. The author, according to this couple, writes “as- tonishingly unprecedented and charming sentences.” Eventually the pair tracks the author to upstate New York and confronts the lone wolf. But in the process they sacrifice selfrespect to bow at the feet of this “noble cipher.”
The struggling characters in Luis Alberto Urrea’s “The Water Museum” have far more pressing concerns. Urrea’s diverse cast works in diners, mows lawns and simply hustles to get by. Several stories meditate on the changing nature of the West, but for the most part Urrea’s 13 pulsing yarns are intense and fastpaced.
In “Amapola,” a “gringo kid with emo hair and eyeliner” gets involved with a girl and her Mexican cartel-connected father. Another young guy, from “Young Man Blues,” has a dad in Pelican Bay prison and a standing beef with a motorcycle gang.
Urrea has a gift for replicating street slang and outfitting his urban landscapes with graffiti, freeway grids and people of all races. More than once he turns his eye on the inner workings of crime. In “The National City Reparation Society,” a dude named Junior returns to his old barrio to help a friend with a scam. Junior’s smart, self-educated. His friend needs him because “you know how to talk white.” Junior appears again in “The Southside Raza Image Federation Corps of Discovery.” After Junior admits to a friend he’s been reading about Lewis and Clark, his friend appears one day with a stolen canoe, wanting to relive the adventures of “Louie and Clark.” Together they cruise polluted waterways, searching for beauty on “the sludge that passed for water.”
Water is central to the collection’s title story, which is set in a creepy, not-too-distant future where abundant water is a thing of the past. Dotting the landscape are “sci-fi looking” towers that extract moisture from the air. Army helicopters patrol crop fields.
The story follows a young boy’s class trip to the Museum of Water. Upon entering, his classmates get a “minuscule spritz of water in the face.” But as the tour goes on, the children grow increasingly agitated. A virtual thunderstorm makes them cry. It’s an appropriate response to this frightening new environment. And we wish it were only fiction.