Millhauser is the guy I should've been introduced to long before I read any Calvino or Bolano or Marquez or even Barthelme. He absolutely falls into that whimsical/playful style of prose and story-telling that appeals to my left-of-center aesthetic, but something kept bugging me while I read the stories in the collection: he wasn't taking the idea far enough for me.
Twelve stories spread out over 228 pages, but only two genuinely seemed to keep my attention rapt, "The Sisterhood of the Night" and "The New Automaton Theater."
In "The Sisterhood of the Night," Millhauser sets up the story in a kind of mock court docket, splitting up certain people's testimonies versus passages like "What We Know" and "What We Assume." Right out of the gate, my interest is piqued because he's given the reader a bizarre and, as yet, unexplainable occurrence. The girls in this particular town are sneaking out at night to meet up with each other. Rumors abound; these midnight meetups are lesbian in nature or ritualistic in sinister, anti-establishment ways. Testimonies are given, members of the sisterhood are named, one commits suicide and stories change again and again.
It's told from the perspective of an adult, which I think gives the piece its strength. As I get older, I view the follies and idiotic nature of my youth in a different light than I did back then. This story's underlying strength is its focus on that dichotomy, that shift of mentality from youth to adult without outright saying it.
"The New Automaton Theater" was one of the few stories I wish had gone on longer despite it already being one of the longer pieces at twenty-four pages long. A society has come so far as to have created entertainment in the form of automatons, or (basically) robots. But these automatons have been worked on and perfected and toiled over for decades by masters and their apprentices. At the time of the story, there are so many automaton theaters that their exact numbers are incalculable. One immediately imagines an entire city of shops and houses surrounded by theater after theater after theater.
Then one day, a young prodigy emerges. His skills are on par with the rest of automaton makers his age, but soon he surpasses them and becomes THE guy to see. He creates automatons that do magic flawlessly and some that do magic that men can't do, which both impresses and disturbs others in his craft. After creating a female automaton, one man weeps at her performance and falls in love with her. The prodigy's talents become world-renowned as he constantly improves upon his work year after year until finally he disappears for ten years.
When he returns with a new show, the product is disturbing to some, unsettling to others, and flat out wrong to most. What Millhauser has done by the time you arrive at this bittersweet ending is embedded you so deeply into mentality of the town that you almost begin to think like them. The biggest problem with this is that it takes him so long in the beginning of the story to set it up that you wonder what the story is actually about.
Overall, Millhauser's collection is an entertaining read. I wasn't overly impressed by it, but his writing is fluid and moves easily across the page. If he's not describing a mall that's become a kind of warehouse selling off bits and pieces of life, he's showing you the possibility of a carnival that goes several levels and several thousand feet below ground purely to keep attracting new patrons. And while these are conceptually interesting, there's something holding Millhauser back. You can almost taste how much further he wants to take the idea, but he never goes over the line - and he should. As it stands, many of the stories end before they get truly interesting.
I have three other collections by Millhauser waiting to be read and I'm hoping that he pushes the boundaries a bit within their pages, but "The Knife-Thrower" is an entertaining collection of stories. I just wish he would've let the weirdness overpower the need for reality a bit more. That's when moments were at their best here.
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