Disruptions

June 26, 2023
Millhauser’s accomplished collection (after Voices in the Night) is a mélange of fantastical imaginings and scenes of domestic oddness. In “The Summer of Ladders,” one of several stories that grapple with suburban groupthink, Millhauser exhibits a Cheeveresque curiosity about—and a fun house distortion of—a small town’s placid facade (“This efflorescence of ladders was probably no more than one of those common accidents of town life, like the sudden appearance of basketball nets on all the garages of a random stretch of block,” the narrator tells himself, before recognizing with a hint of ominousness that “the ladders were growing taller”). “The Column Dwellers of Our Town” features a community full of modern-day stylites—people who chose a solitary life of asceticism atop a column, not unlike the Christian saints of late antiquity. Millhauser excels at scenes of strange encounters, as in “One Summer Night,” about a 16-year-old boy who unexpectedly spends an evening with his girlfriend’s mother—who tells him she’s in a “moon mood” and asks to be pushed on a swing. The fabulist efforts also pay off, as in “The Little People,” where normal-sized humans coexist with a group of much smaller counterparts. This will please Millhauser’s longtime fans and earn him new admirers.