Little Kingdoms
Steven Millhauser
Vintage, 1998
U.S. trade paper, reprint
ISBN 978-0375701436
240 pages; $14.00

Steven Millhauser is one of my favorite writers. His stories always tread a fine line between the mundane and the fantastic; even the stories that on first glimpse appear to be set firmly in this world are, on closer inspection, just a degree away from reality. Millhauser’s stories and novels are highly imaginative, told in beautifully crafted prose – sometimes so beautifully crafted that it is transporting. Millhauser’s tales stay with you a long time, and if you read enough of his writing you start to notice his themes, particularly the nobility of work and the possibilities of the American dream.

Little Kingdoms is a collection of three novellas, rather an odd sort of book to find these days; readers tend to like their reading in big bricks (for example, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, which clocks in at 576 pages, or Brandon Sanderson’s new book, The Way of Kings, which contains a whopping 1,008 pages) or in short stories (which are experiencing something of a renaissance in recent years, with single author collections turning into big-selling award winners, as with last year’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower). A novella is just long enough to usually require more than one burst of reading, barring a big chunk of free time on vacation, but doesn’t provide a complete world in which one can become lost for days at a time. They last just long enough to occupy your brain fully for two or three hours; but the good ones stay with you much longer.

The first novella in this collection is precisely that type of good one. “The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne” is the story of a man who draws cartoons in the early years of the twentieth century. It begins on a July night in 1920, when Payne looks up from his work to discover that it is three o’clock in the morning. He decides to take a walk around his house in the balmy stillness of the blue night, taking a route I would wager none of us has ever attempted. The walk sets the tone for the entire story, which is largely an ode to Payne’s dedication to his craft, his art.

Millhauser writes gorgeous prose about the most common work, finding poetry in the way we go about our everyday lives. This passage, for instance, is extraordinary in the way it describes the ordinary:

Franklin had to admit … that he had never felt better in his life. In the mornings he rose before the rattle of the milk bottles and, filled with a kind of energetic serenity, went downstairs in the bird-loud dark, showing its first streak of gray, to put up a pot of coffee and prepare fresh orange juice. He sliced the plump Florida oranges in half on the breadboard, pressed the juicy halves firmly against the upthrust knob of the juicer, and carefully checked for pips. Freight cars loaded with slatted boxes of oranges picked from sun-drenched trees in orchards in Florida had rushed through the night at sixty miles an hour through Goergia, the Carolinas, Virginia, all the way to the state of New York, where husky men with bulging veins in the upper arms had loaded the boxes onto trucks and driven them to country stores in northern villages, solely in order that he, Franklin Payne, could buy one dozen sun-ripened oranges and stand in his kitchen to make fresh orange juice for his wife and daughter. It was all astonishing, as astonishing as the milk that arrived in clear glass bottles every morning, with the cream clinging to the top, or the brightening air that poured through the large windows in their solid oak frames – yes, the whole world was simply pouring in on him.

To have a character so inhabit a moment – a perfectly normal moment, one that most of us glide through without even paying attention – is a virtuoso performance. The mindfulness involved in thinking of the journey of the orange from field to juice glass a thousand miles away is inspiring. That a writer would consider that worth writing about explains why I find Millhauser so amazing.

Payne travels through his life, sometimes paying attention, sometimes not – and the “not” causes him some huge problems. Throughout the story, though, the writing remains luminous. This book is worth owning for this novella alone.

The other two novellas are interesting postmodern works, also beautifully written, but not nearly as compelling as “The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne.” “The Princess, the Dwarf, and the Dungeon” delves deep into a fairy tale world and makes it real – but at the same time makes it irrelevant except as a fairy tale. In other words, the fairy story is stripped of its mystery and magic and made an ordinary tale of love and loss. When the fairy story becomes so real, it loses the resonance it normally has, and becomes merely sad. The story is told in paragraphs, each with a title of sorts that warns what the paragraph will discuss, a chopping of the story into bits that works to focus the reader’s attention on how the story is gradually, slowly, becoming the story of an unhappy marriage rather than a glossy story of happily ever after. No character has a name; all are defined simply by their role. The town below the castle seems irrelevant to the denizens of the castle, even as the town sees the castle as good for nothing but stories. It’s an interesting technique, one that makes the characters simultaneously emotionally resonant and emotionally distant.

The third novella, “Catalogue of the Exhibition: The Art of Edmund Moorash (1810-1846),” is another postmodern piece, in which Millhauser tells the story of a fictional artist’s life by examining his artworks. The story has the tone of a scholarly work, leavened by the liberal use of quotations from the journals of the various characters in the artist’s life: his sister, his friend, his friend’s sister. Many of the artworks are described in such a way as to suggest that the canvases are almost entirely black or white, with figures so blurred and indistinct as to be nothing more than implied rather than portrayed. Yet by examining these canvases, the scholar-narrator manages to tell the story of the artist’s life and loves. It’s an intriguing conceit. The story reveals once again Millhauser’s fascination with work as fundamental to the human experience, and the art of storytelling (be it through painting, cartooning or writing) to be the art of transforming work into fable.

Little Kingdoms rewards the reader’s close attention. Millhauser is experimenting here, and succeeding – though, to my mind, the first and most straightforward of the novellas is the best. Even there, though, Millhauser is writing a sort of New Weird tale, in which dissonance and mindfulness both are critical to the story. Millhauser’s characters play close attention to everything, and as a result they see what is odd and off-kilter in the world; they manipulate it to create works of their own, thus binding themselves to and perpetuating the Weird. The odd in the ordinary is ultimately what is most attractive about these stories.