Steven Millhauser is obsessed with obsession. Each of the stories in his collection Dangerous Laughter presents an unhealthy fixation—sometimes exhibited by an individual, at other times by a small cadre of friends, or even a community or entire nation. All in all, this book could stand as a series of fictional case studies in obsessive-compulsive behavior and the madness of crowds.
Or the madness of fictional animals. The opening story, "Cat 'n' Mouse" is presented in the form of script treatment for an animated cartoon, a "Tom and Jerry"-ish story of a cat in constant—and constantly unsuccessful—pursuit of his mouse nemesis. Here the obsession is one of natural instinct, heightened by the slapstick comedy one associates with the oeuvre of Looney Tunes or Hanna-Barbera. But Millhauser periodically interrupts his narrative to insert Dostoevskian asides on the psychology of the conflict.
The cat pauses in his pursuit to ponder the existential nature of his plight: "His life, in relation to the mouse, is one long failure, a monotonous succession of unspeakable humiliations….Although he knows that he will never catch the mouse, who will forever escape into his mousehole a half inch ahead of the reaching claw, he also knows that only if he catches the mouse will his wretched life be justified…." Then Millhauser cuts off these musings, and continues on with his cat- and-mouse story—involving dynamite, decoys, large pieces of cheese in elaborate mousetraps, etc. The story is clever and funny, but also thought-provoking —its power derived from its odd juxtaposition of psychological reflection and crude pratfalls.
Other stories in Dangerous Laughter present less familiar obsessions. The hero in "The Room in the Attic" becomes romantically drawn to the sister of a friend—even though he has never seen her. After a nervous breakdown, the young lady isolates herself in an unlighted attic, where he visits her day after day, conversing and exchanging innocent caresses in the enveloping darkness. In the title story of the collection, a group of teenagers become addicted to bouts of irresistible laughter or weeping, with startling and destructive consequences. In "The Other Town," an odd compulsion takes over an entire city: the citizens are intent on maintaining an exact replica of every building, street, tree, plant or object in a mirror- image community that they have built on their city limits.
In several of Millhauser's stories, unhealthy fixations spread throughout society—developing into a kind of mass hysteria. In "The Dome," a fad for enclosing buildings in transparent plastic coverings starts out as a mere architectural quirk but escalates into an insane desire to turn the great outdoors into an even greater indoors. In "A Change in Fashion," women suddenly decide that the best outfits are those that allow them to remain unseen, an object of imaginative fantasy rather than mere vulgar sight. But here too, the new style gets out of hand. Dresses "grew in every direction; in some instances they exceeded the size of rooms and had to be worn in large outdoor spaces, like backyards or public parks….One dress contained in its side a little red door, which was said to lead to a room with a bed, a mirror and a shaded lamp…."
The oddities in Millhauser's stories often take on fantastic or phantasmagorical qualities. "A Precursor of the Cinema" is written in the form of a scholarly treatise, but soon collapses into unabashed magical realism. The narrative focuses on the experiments of Harlan Crane (1844-88?), a painter whose canvases are capable of coming to life. Objects and people in the painting can step out of the picture and move among the onlookers, and sometimes the viewers can even enter into the canvas. Crane's work is presented as an alternative to the motion picture technology of Thomas Edison, who serves as inspiration for another story in this collection, "The Wizard of West Orange" —built on the premise that the great inventor had some dark and twisted technology locked away in his basement, an invention far too dangerous for the general public.
Millhauser's stories are typically quite simple in their underlying premise, yet he manages to flesh out his feverish conceits in dramatic fashion. As many have noted, his writing is very much in the spirit of Kafka and Borges, but also wickedly attuned to the particular craziness of our own times—when the most bizarre concepts and ideas can go "viral" in a heartbeat. We have the technology to raise our madnesses to levels previously unknown, and this very escalation is a recurring subject in Millhauser's work.
Perhaps the best description of Steven Millhauser comes from the mouth of one of his characters, a bohemian outsider at a local high school who is a frighteningly well-read intellectual, yet shows no interest in getting good grades or high test scores. His justification for his indifference both applies to Millhauser himself and also serves as a fitting defense of conceptual fiction as a whole:
"Art, he said, was a controlled madness, which was why people who selected books for high school English classes were careful to choose only false books that were discussable, boring, and sane, or else, if they chose a real book by mistake, they presented it in a way that ignored everything great and mad about it. …He said that books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes."
Millhauser achieves just this in Dangerous Laughter . By his own definition, he has delivered a "real book"— albeit one packed to the brim with unrealities. And it is to the credit of this obsession obsessed author that he has delivered a volume that also makes for compulsive reading.