Novellas Are Better. Are Millhauser's Best?

Dear Abby: If the short story is the one-night stand of prose readers, and the novel is the monogamous, committed coupling, where does that leave the novella?

A “friend with benefits” relationship? A novella is more than that, I think. Maybe that staple of Hallmark movies: the “best friends'' who eventually catch feelings for each other? Girl, please.

No, the novella is that most rare of pairings:

The perfect traveling companion who is always up to travel anytime, who can match you energy for energy, for whom the word simpatico is a just a crude approximation of the lasagna layers of trust and appreciation that exists in your conjoined sojourns. For me, that is the sensation I feel when I read a great novella, and no one’s novellas stir my blood like Steven Millhauser’s.

In his latest short story collection Disruptions, Millhauser has interleaved two novellas among his shorter work, but to me they stand out like the giants in Dante’s Inferno. They tower over their neighboring denizens in the 8th and 9th circles of hell like brute forces of narrative.

Now, I’ve been told there are readers who read collections in a linear vector from front cover to back cover like obedient Libras. Not me. I’m one of those readers who reads the shortest pieces first, jumping around as I ladder up to longer pieces. I acclimatize myself like I would crate-train a puppy: slowly increasing my exposure until I feel at home.

But not for Millhauser. He’s the only writer whom I traverse conversely, reading his longest pieces first. Why? Because in his novellas the flowering of his mastery of narrative structure achieves full bloom. For instance, Millhauser starts his first novella in Disruptions, “The Little People,” in his typical Millhausian way, lulling us in with his rope-a-dope prose before delivering an uppercut to our expectations:

They are citizens of our town, who own property, pay taxes, and vote. They dress like us. They speak like us. They eat like us. They are two inches tall.

I love the tone here. It begins with a whiff of apology, the recognizable hackneyed trope of minority explainers everywhere—“they’re just like us”—before he slams us with their difference. This seduction of the reader is evident in a number the first sentences from a number of stories in the collection:

From “One Summer Night”: In the summer of my sixteenth birthday I fell in love with the night.

From “The Column Dweller of our Town”: The columns of our town range in height from 60 to 140 feet.

From the unusual love story “A Common Predicament”: She’s the one, the only one for me, after all these years I’ve finally found her, so why should I allow a little habit of hers to destroy my happiness?”

From a story of divorce “He Takes, She Takes”: He takes the dish rack, she takes the hat rack, he takes the table, she takes the chairs, he takes the upstairs, she takes the downstairs…”

And from my favorite “After the Beheading” in which the title is the start.

“The Little People” employs a framing device that I first noticed in “The Princess, the Dwarf, and the Dungeon” in his novella collection Little Kingdoms (1993). He will introduce a section with a heading and in the paragraph(s) that follow will expound on that heading. In the case of TLP, the initial headings recall ethnographic studies: Who They Are, Where They Live, Their Community, Employment, Friendships. By doing so, Millhauser nakedly posits the reader as an observer, an outsider to this story unfolding before us, as we peer through the fenestrations he slides open on the edifice of his story. From a craft perspective, it allows the writer to abruptly change topics as he pulls his narrative focus from subject to subject.

Maybe that would be enough for most genre Science Fiction/Fantasy stories—this fully fleshed-out exploration of an alien community and culture—but for Millhauser this is merely table setting for his larger courses. He begins by slipping into his paragraphs wisps of language and thoughts that lead the reader on by their bloodhound noses:

We want them to be happy. We want them to love us. We want them to forgive us.

Sometimes we have the sensation that the world has become sharper and more detailed. It’s as if we had been walking in the rain and now the sun has come out. The world bursts out around us. We are born anew. We see.

Then, somehow, like the illusionist Eisenheim—a real 19th century Vienna magician whose story as told by Millhauser was the basis of a successful 2006 movie, The Illusionist—he takes those wisps and ties them together as we move through the novella. Sometimes, he uses the trope of a case study, such as the romance of Catherine White (Big Person) with Shingle Johnson (Little Person. Other times he lists the changes that sweep over Big People culture, to underscore how their appreciation of shortness and quietness acts as a metaphor for the larger themes of love and self-acceptance. These begin to be reflected in his paragraph headings also, becoming less taxonomic and, I don’t know, more resonant: Think Big. Think Again. A New World. 

By the end, having learned all that we will ever know about the Little People town of Greenhaven and its inhabitants, the reader stands in league with the Big People, warmed by a hope for ourselves. This salvation is captured in the final sentences:

We are happy. The sky is blue. Then a doubt comes over us. What does it mean that we wish to disappear into their world? Does it mean that our own world is no longer enough? Do they have the answer to a question we don’t even know we have? At once we resolve to welcome them even more eagerly into our lives, to greet them with open arms, at the same time reminding ourselves to open our arms very slowly and carefully, for fear of shattering their bones as we knock them across the room with our forearms bigger than porch posts and our knuckles like knee-high boulders.

Often the end of a Millhauser story elicits this kind of warmth. Not an epiphany with its piercing light of understanding but a more muted realization about the nature of the world we have just glimpsed and a latent hopefulness that arises and which as readers are shocked to find in ourselves.

What Floor, Please?

Millhauser’s titles remind me of great elevator pitches. For example, the other novella in the collection is entitled, “Kafka in High School, 1959.” (Until this story, I had never considered the similarities in the work of Millhauser and Kafka. Both often employ “common man” characters who submit to their slanted reality even when, at some point, they see fate barrelling down on them. One could also see this story as a paean to the great Czech, and for MIllhauser, a weird literary flex.)

If that isn’t enough to seduce you, the first sentence will certainly suck you in:

Kafka is sitting in AP English class, two desks from the back, second row from the door.

Seeing Kafka in this scene furtively trying to read Four Great Russian Short Novels on his lap while ignoring his teacher drone on wah-wah-wah about restrictive and non-restrictive clauses calls to mind the pure fun of watching authority figures in the old Peanuts animations. In fact, Kafka is outwardly the most humorous piece in Disruptions, where the late 1950’s, Brooklyn/Long Island situation comedy setting reveals the harried emotions, doomed outlook, and irrepressible rebelliousness that we associate with Kafka. 

Headings establish the tableaus in which we find Kafka: Kafka in the living Room. Kafka Plays Ping-Pong. Kafka and His Sisters Play Monopoly. And my favorite, Kafka Works on His Tan. We observe Kafka’s interior monologue at the beach that harkens back to the ubiquitous staple of comic books–the Charles Atlas beach ad–with Kafka as the skinny unfortunate with sand in his face. 

In most of the scenes, we are in Kafka’s head, so they are presented as a meticulously observed reality where no single detail is spared his punctilious gaze. Given his later work, of course Kafka must have been like this, even in high school, as when Kafka Looks at Himself in the Mirror and sees:

…eyes are so dark that they seem to be glaring out at the world like the eyes of someone hiding under a bed.

We are also privy to the philosophic broodings of the young Kafka who, like most teens, can’t let any awkward interaction pass without reconsidering and regretting his actions. Then, like the emo hero he is, he indulges himself as he falls further into the well of his own cogitations. After a particularly fumbling telephone conversation with his crush, Bonnie Wilcox, in which his final words to her are, “I don’t know,” Kafka Asks Himself What He Knows:

He must know something. Everyone knows something. He knows the capitals of all the countries of Central America, a list that he memorized for a test in sixth grade. He knows the names, colors, and monetary values of all the properties on the Monopoly board, from Mediterranean Avenue to Boardwalk. He knows that the word “mayor” in the sentence “They elected him mayor” is called an objective complement.

After a three-page list of things he knows that run the gamut from Chekhov’s plays to nicknames of Major Leaguers to the complete cast of characters of early television shows, he concludes with:

He knows that he is growing tired. He knows that he knows nothing.

Poor Kafka, we readers think, poor self-defeating Kafka. And truthfully, that is the immediate thought whenever I read any bio of Kafka. Even his Wikipedia entry drips with pathos. And yet, Millhauser leavens his portrayal of Kafka with numbered “Memory” entries from Kafka’s 1950’s peers, boys and girls whose more objective observations leave us not with Kafka as the Charlie Brown of his community, but a character more akin to Linus Van Pelt–quiet, considered, and a fount of considerable inner strength when needed.

What surprised me was what happened next. What happened next was, Kafka grabs him by the throat with one hand and holds him like that. Stands there holding him by the neck and staring him in the eye. When he lowers his hand, Big Guy starts coughing and rubbing his neck. Says it’s a free fucking country, but he walks away. That was the only time I saw Kafka do a thing like that. It made an impression on me.

By the end, Kafka articulates in breathtaking prose the crux of his disposition, that nagging suspicion that rankles his existence and which I can’t help reading as the clearest distillation of what might be called Millhauser’s ethos.

He feels, as he waits, that he has been shown something that he is meant to understand, if only he knew what it was.

…but it’s also true, he can’t help thinking, that his awareness that he is seeing these things is itself an act that separates him from the act of seeing.

Millhauser’s Kafka voices the writer’s dilemma of being observer-artificier-seer and frustrating emotional impact:

This thought, which at some other time might have seemed interesting and worth pursuing, irritates him.

Put another way, the inadequacy of language and its inherent limitation mirrors the sentiments of another hyper-sensitive writer from another culture, Yukio Mushima, who in Sun and Steel writes: "Oh, the fierce longing simply to see, without words!

The glimpses we are offered of the varied and inventive worlds in Disruptions, especially those highly developed situations in his novellas, carry us on the longing and hope for a world that we may, one day, be able to not only accept but comprehend. I’m reminded of my writing teacher who once told me that readers read primarily to understand the author’s mind. I think now he may be half-right. Some of us also read to see the world redrawn for us again, by a writer who knows “...what fascinates us is the sense of an invisible world perpetually on the verge of becoming visible.”

The Novella King

The novella is the middle-distance race of the literary world:  longer than the short story sprint and shorter than the novel marathon. Steven Millhauser is so prolific at the genre he has three standalone novella collections: Little Kingdoms, Enchanted Night, and The King in the Tree. As a reader, I enjoy the extended space and time he has to develop his storylines and complicate his characters, which accumulate in layers of meaning which often delight and surprise me. 

As a writer, though, I marvel at his strategic choices, when he chooses to introduce an element, what he chooses to reveal at what time, and the apparent seamless way he has of tying everything together toward a glorious finish.

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Image by Jonny Caspari.