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The Condition of Wonder
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11687 |
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BOOK WORLD
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2 / 1994 |
1,488 Words |
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George Garrett
George Garrett is the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative
Writing at the University of Virginia. He has written numerous
short story and poetry collections and novels, his latest
being Entered From the Sun. In 1989 he received the T.S. Eliot
Award and more recently, the PEN/Faulkner Bernard Malamud
Award for Short Fiction. |
LITTLE KINGDOMS
Steven Millhauser
New York: Poseidon Press, 1993
239 pp., $21.00
Not surprisingly, Steven Millhauser's publishers have been baffled from the beginning as to how they should label and market his fiction, but they have nevertheless managed to recognize ("our prominent literary explorer of the imagination") the undeniable excellence of his writing. So far six of his works have appeared, to the evident gratification and delight of a small but growing cult of dedicated readers.
Much of our "literary" or "writerly" fiction, including that of the majority of our genuinely eccentric and experimental writers (a loose definition that includes almost everyone who is creating fiction that is not obviously "realistic" and overtly "mainstream"), has not been so lucky. These writers must struggle, first of all, to put their work in print, to be published at all, and then they must devote themselves as much to the art of survival as to the crafting of fiction. There are a good many such writers in America today, beleaguered and courageous; and it speaks well of them that, by and large, they have not succumbed to the infections of bitterness and envy. Unlike the more anxiously competitive writers of "mainstream" or "popular" fiction, they tend to wish each other well and, as in the case of Steven Millhauser, to become part of his cult of readers, seeing him as representative in a general sense of their own ways and means and his particular success as beneficial to one and all.
Millhauser's publisher, true to form, is more apologetic of the company he keeps and, in fact, belongs to, writing: "There's nothing overly academic about Millhauser's fictional inventions--for every bit of cleverness, there's the art of true passion." Freely translated, that says: Okay folks, so it is a little bit, pardon the expression, "academic"--hothouse, ivory tower stuff--nevertheless, it is not excessively so. And even if it is (alas) clever, there is a subtext of "true passion." As distinguished, one supposes, from false passion.
There is no way, thank the Lord, that Millhauser can be converted into Pat Conroy or, for that matter, aligned with lightweight acrobats like Frederick Barthelme or Barry Hannah. There are plenty of jokes ("cleverness"), large and small, in the worlds created and exploited by Millhauser; but his work is no joke. In everything he tries and touches there is power, resonance, originality,
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