dudeco

Many of Steven Millhauser's stories remind me of E.T.A. Hoffmann's. Dangerous Laughter contains stories with a wider array of styles than I'm used to from him. His earlier collections that I've read (The Knife Thrower, The Barnum Museum, In the Penny Arcade) are dominated by his imaginary histories of characters in the nineteen century who become experts in one of the burgeoning technologies of the era (clockwork automatons, magic, electricity, etc.). Dangerous Laughter has two stories along these lines ("A Precursor of the Cinema" and "The Wizard of West Orange"), but the rest--though similarly inventive and/or focused on the vaguely fantastic--are different. I enjoyed most of the stories, though a few of them wore on my patience a bit once the climax he was building toward became obvious. Honestly, Millhauser's popularity--though deserved--has always surprised me a little, considering that he writes the same kinds of stories that the better so-called genre authors of science fiction write. But where those authors have their fans in the sci-fi community and are regularly published in the genre pulps, they rarely achieve widespread recognition as Millhauser has. I had a creative writing instructor in college who told me that, in her opinion, the difference between literary writers and genre writers is that literary writers focus on character whereas genre writers focus on plot and the conventions of the genre in which they work (i.e., sci-fi writers focus on speculative science, horror writers focus on telling a scary story, romance writers on romantic relationships, etc.). I assume that most critics consider Millhauser to be a literary writer (or at least a postmodern writer--which in most cases is equated with the term "literary"), but he does not focus on characters except insofar as they serve to push his fantastic plots and/or themes forward--just in the way that most genre writers do. So either my professor was wrong, or Millhauser is one of the few genre writers lucky enough to have crossed over into the mainstream literary world. In any case, more power to him.

2023-01-07 06:12