The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Enchanted Night by Steven Millhauser
Brian Evenson

Steven Millhauser. Enchanted Night. Crown, 1999. 109 pp. $17.00.

Millhauser’s latest offering is a lean novella consisting of seventy-four short, titled prose sections. Through these Millhauser chronicles a moonlit summer night in Connecticut. He alternates between several different story lines: a mannequin coming to life, a drunken and lonely man stumbling home, a girl waiting for a lover that may or may not exist, a failed author and his abortive relations with a childhood friend’s mother, toys coming to life, a band of teenage girls who break into houses and leave cryptic notes, and so on. Punctuating these stories are choruses of night voices, the sounds of insects, and a piper calling the children from their beds.

Though some of the sections are decidedly not Millhauser at his best, most are strong. The book accumulates into a larger whole, offering an intriguing and airy conceit on the dynamics of summer night. The writing is often lyrical and controlled, sometimes nostalgic. Millhauser’s deft touch allows careful and quiet glimpses into private obsessions and lives.

Ultimately Enchanted Night lacks the impact of Millhauser’s best stories and novels, yet Enchanted Night seems a perfect book with which to ease someone into the work of this important American writer. Indeed, it stands in relation to Millhauser’s more ambitious work in the same fashion that José Saramago’s The Tale of the Unknown Island stands in relation to his: the author’s characteristic impulses, concerns, and gestures are there but gauzily transfigured as fairy tale. Taken in these terms, as a fairy tale, Enchanted Night is at once intriguing and highly successful. [Brian Evenson]