Book Reviews:: Steven Millhauser: Dangerous Laughter

My book review project is meant not as a project to “review” books but solely to reassess what I take away as a visceral reaction to a book. No need to intellectualize it or analyze it. Just a quick reaction. It is just my attempt to take something away from a book after reading it. Pure impressions. Sound bytes. The first book is Dangerous Laughter (2008) by Steven Millhauser.

This is a collection of 13 stories divided into 3 quite distinct parts.

The first section of the book recreates dreary, small-town, teenage existence not unlike the world created by Sofia Coppola in The Virgin Suicides. The story, “Dangerous Laughter,” is particularly effective in this respect in its recreation of a town in which groups of adolescents get together and laugh in “laugh parties.” One girl gains such notoriety that her whole being is defined by her ability to laugh. When the trend switches to other forms of entertainment, this girl tries to revive the “laughter parties,” but eventually dies in a laughing fit.

The Second Section, "Impossible Architectures," seems to follow Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities or a potential fiction by Borges about architecture. The first story of this section, "The Dome," imagines the trend of plastic domes in which residents can be outside in the always perfect weather atmosphere created by the domes. As you can imagine, the domes get bigger and bigger. One of the results is that things in the world like trees or hills that once towered are now dwarfed by the Dome. This is the New Miniaturism. The Dome thereby abolishes Nature. Or, at least, nature as we knew it. The world becomes an artifice. The Dome represents the triumph of the consumer society because, as its detractors argue, it has transformed the entire country into a gigantic mall. At a conference in Oslo, architects and engineers dream of a transparent globe which would surround the entire earth.

The last story of this section, "The Tower," imagines a village that builds a tower so high as to touch heaven. It is so high that it takes many generations to climb to the top. There is a hierarchy of those that live at the bottom and those that live in the middle and the top.

The last section of the book, “Heretical Histories,” imagines new dimensions for science and invention. “A Precursor to the Cinema” is the apocryphal biography of an artist/inventor whose paintings achieve such a level of verisimilitude that they come to life. His invention/show, The Phantoptic Theatre, allows viewers to actually walk through the paintings.

“The Wizard of West Orange” is about an inventor, a wizard, who invents a device that records and reproduces the sense of touch. Like a phonograph, the haptograph works by the principles of mimicry and invention. What makes it beautiful, as the narrator-librarian in the wizard’s laboratory notes, is the new combinations of sensorial experiences which break through the frontiers of touch. The invention is destroyed in an assistant’s rage which leaves the narrator to wonder if the wizard really wanted the invention to hit the market or not, anyway.