Dangerous Laughter

For the third year in a row, I am embarking on reading the ten books selected by the New York Times as best of the year. I start off the 2008 decalogue with Dangerous Laughter, a collection of thirteen short stories by Steven Millhauser.

The stories are grouped into three themes, with one story serving as an "opening cartoon." That is "Cat 'n Mouse," an existential look at the eternal struggle between a Tom and Jerry-like pair. Anyone who has ever seen one of these cartoons (and who could not have?) will smile knowingly at a sentence like this: "The mouse crashes through, leaving a mouse-shaped hole. The cat crashes through, replacing the mouse-shaped hole with a larger, cat-shaped hole." The story takes up the questions raised by Who Framed Roger Rabbit and takes them to their philosophical conclusion: "The cat snatches him up in a fist. The cat's red tongue slides over glistening teeth sharp as ice picks. Here and there, over a tooth, a bright star expands and contracts. The cat opens his jaws wider, closes his eyes, and hesitates. The death of the mouse is desirable in every way, but will life without him really be pleasurable? Will the mouse's absence satisfy him entirely? Is it conceivable that he may miss the mouse, from time to time? Is it possible that he needs the mouse, in some disturbing way?"

The first part of the collection is called "Vanishing Acts," and contains a story called "The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman," about a woman who seemingly vanishes into thin air, and the title story, about a fad among teenagers who gather for extended periods of laughter. The best story of the book, and one of the better stories I've read in a long time, is "The Room in the Attic," about a teenage boy who strikes up a friendship with a girl who will only receive him in her darkened room, so he is unable to see her.

The section called "Impossible Architectures" recalls Millhauser's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Martin Dressler, which concerned a department store magnate who creates a simulcram of the world inside one of his stores. In this section, the stories are really faux histories of extreme habitation, such as "The Dome," in which slowly but surely all of America is enclosed underneath a plexiglass dome, or "The Other Town," in which a town has built an exact but empty replica next door, or "The Tower," in which a society builds a tower to heaven, that is so tall that it can not be climbed in one lifetime.

These stories, as do those in the final section, "Heretical Histories," have a whiff of Rod Serling about them, as they seem perfectly reasonable but then veer into the supernatural. In the latter section, we read about a town's historical society ("Here at the Historical Society") which examines what exactly is historically significant. It's true that if you stick a commonplace object into the ground, it will become valuable over great periods of time, but why not immediately? The story "A Precursor to the Cinema" recalls Millhauser's book Eisenheim the Illusionist (made into the film The Illusionist), which is about a painter who seems to have been able to capture movement in his still-lifes. The book ends with a story about an inventor like Thomas Edison, "The Wizard of West Orange," who is working on a haptograph, a machine that can record and replay the sensations of touch. This story is not quite satisfying, as it's never really expressed just what is so wrong with that idea.

In addition to being stories about ideas, these pieces are also excellently rendered. The prose in "The Room in the Attic" flows effortlessly. I read this story on a train ride back from New York City and it made the time pass by quickly. It's the kind of story that can make lesser writers either inspired to do better or want to give it up entirely, as it's hard to imagine doing any better.