Enchanted Night: A Novella [Hardcover]

Steven Millhauser (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 12, 1999

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Steven Millhauser returns with a magical novella imbued with the transforming power of the (almost) full moon.

"A hot summer night in southern Connecticut, tide going out and the moon still rising. Laura Engstrom, fourteen years old, sits up in bed and throws the covers off."

Others, too, are awakened by a chorus of night voices: Haverstraw, a thirty-nine-year-old failed writer living in his mother's attic; an old woman who lives alone; three teenage boys looking for trouble; a gang of girls who roam the night and break into houses; a lonely young man looking for love; a beautiful mannequin whose cold fiberglass arms begin to quicken; a group of restless children; and assorted dolls, toys, and animals long forgotten in an attic.

"This is the night of revelation. This is the night the dolls wake. This is the night of the dreamer in the attic. This is the night of the piper in the woods."

Only Steven Millhauser could transform our childhood legends of the night into a hypnotic adult tale of passionate enchantment, encounters of darkness and illumination, human passions and inhuman awakenings. Read it by the light of the moon.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In novels such as Edwin Mullhouse and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Martin Dressler, Steven Millhauser conjured fictions as intricate and delicately formed as soap bubbles. True to form, his Enchanted Night seems to want to float right up out of the reader's hand. In its pages are many of Millhauser's trademark fascinations: dolls; mannequins; an obsessed artist; teenage girls meeting secretly at night; and above all, the strangeness lurking just under the surface of everyday life. Set entirely over the course of one night, Enchanted Night follows the denizens of a Connecticut town as they rise from their beds under the light of a brilliant, almost-full moon. Fourteen-year-old Laura Engstrom wakes to a restlessness so fierce that "if she doesn't do something right away, this second, she'll scream." Middle-aged Haverstraw (who still lives with his mother) writes for hours in the attic, then leaves to wander the streets. Janet Manning trysts with a lover in her yard, and a band of teenage girls breaks into houses only to leave behind the cryptic message "WE ARE YOUR DAUGHTERS." Meanwhile, more magical events are afoot. "This is the night of revelation. This is the night the dolls wake. This is the night of the dreamer in the attic. This is the night of the piper in the woods," a chorus of night voices tells us--and a mannequin begins to stir behind a store window, while all over town, abandoned dolls and stuffed animals come slowly to life.

So far, so good. But somewhere along the way, the fairy dust gets a little thick. Is it the chapter in which the moon goddess ravishes virginal Danny? ("Now she strokes the skin of the sleeping one, now she kisses his eyelids closed in dream, now she stiffens his love-lance with her hand.") Or perhaps the appearance of Pan, "a moon-dancer, a flute-dreamer" making music for the town's children? How about the "Song of the One-Eyed Cuddly Bear" chapter, which reads, in its entirety, "I wuv woo. Does woo wuv me?" The only real danger posed in this wispy novella--"the man with shiny black hair" who stalks Laura in order to add her to his "gallery"--is not actually a threat, we're assured. Millhauser even reduces his bold girl outlaws, with their "pleasure in violation," to sipping midnight lemonade with their victim. And what, really, is magic without danger? Decoration, mostly, though there's nothing particularly wrong with that--just nothing particularly urgent either. None of which is to say that there aren't moments of startling beauty in Enchanted Night. There is no stylist more graceful than Millhauser at his best, and here he writes movingly about the formless yearnings of adolescence and the mortal sweetness of sex. Yet even the prose can't quite animate his novella. In the end, Enchanted Night is a rarefied aesthetic experience that asks for very little back. --Mary Park

From Publishers Weekly

Compared to his ambitious, Pulitzer Prize-winning Martin Dressler, Millhauser's new novella may seem slight, but it has a resonance and fairy tale allure that belie its slim page count. Set on a sultry summer night when an almost-full moon hovers over Southern Connecticut, the book follows a handful of small-town characters who yearn for anonymity, recognition, love or escape. Laura Engstrom, 14, seeks a solitary release from the deep restlessness that makes "her bones itch." Haverstraw, 39, lives with his mother while he works on a novel and despairs of ever achieving anything with his life. Janet Manning, 20, longs for the appearance of a "heartbreaker" she met on the beach that afternoon. A drunken romantic, William Cooper, 28, gazes into storefront displays, hoping for love and a lucky break. An old woman who lives alone yearns for company. He gracefully intertwines these lives and others with magical elementsAa mannequin that comes alive, a chorus of "night voices," a silent visit from a moon goddessAto create a trance world suffused with luminescence and longing, where each character verges on the brink of fulfillment or collapse. Millhauser sketches each person's plight in a few skillful lines and repeats gestures and thoughts so their variations resound on many levels. A set of abandoned dolls, for example, awaken and pantomime a sorrowful romance that echoes Janet's desire for her young lover, Haverstraw's long-standing friendship with a friend's mother and Coop's abstracted love for the mannequin. Only a scattering of facile nursery-rhyme type of songs echo hollowly in Millhauser's elegant, penetrating tale. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 112 pages
• Publisher: Crown; 1st edition (October 12, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 060960516X
• ISBN-13: 978-0609605165
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #463,542 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The night is beautiful., March 1, 2000

By 

Brent Woods - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Enchanted Night: A Novella (Hardcover)

A beautifully descriptive novella which washed over me effortlessly. A few cliched strands couldn't ruin the emotive tone set by Millhauser. It reads like a short dream you wish could go on forever. Readers tip: Plan your time to read this in one go as it's rhythm is vital to the overall effect.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Gossamer Delicacy and Heady Sensuality, October 19, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Enchanted Night: A Novella (Hardcover)

Pulitzer Prize winner Steven Millhauser successfully marries the marvelous to the mundane in his shimmering novella, Enchanted Night. Enchanted Night is the thought chronicle of dozens of insomniacs in a Connecticut seaside suburb: three teenage boys who are attempting to break into a library; a music-mesmerized army of children; a pair of teenaged lovers on the brink of intimacy; an ominous "man with shiny black hair," and a strange band of girls who break into houses only to steal meaningless knick knacks and who leave behind notes proclaiming, WE ARE YOUR DAUGHTERS. These are the human insomniacs. This is Millhauser, so, of course, there are others.

There are the dolls, "not dolls in the freshness of their youth...but old, abandoned, dolls, no longer believed in," and there is a chic department store mannequin who "dreams of release, of the dropping of her guard, of the voluptuous fall into motion."

These "moon-mad, summer-looney" characters have intentions that range from friendly to sinister to bizarre. Among the bizarre are Haverstraw, a thirty-nine year old man still living with his mother who spends his time working on "an immense project, an experiment in memory," and Mrs. Kasco, the sixty-one year old woman who regrets not having seduced Haverstraw when he (and she) were younger. Perhaps it is not too late; these two strange-but-wonderful characters meet each night for conversation and wrangling over matters as far-out as how "memory keeps turning into conversation."

Overall, Millhauser is himself in this book: masterful, erudite, inventive, original, poetic, restrained. There are, however, a few moments when we have to stop, shake our heads and wonder, "What happened?" The most glaring instance encompasses the seven words that make up "Song of the One-Eyed Cuddly Bear."

Millhauser's prose is...Millhauser: poetic, lyrical, sensual, heady and delicate all at the same time. The entire novella is shot through with the enchantment of a full moon on a warm August night, perfectly alternating gossamer delicacy, heady sensuality and beguiling magic.

For the most part, Enchanted Night works its charm, and, like its characters, we, too, come to dread the sun and instead long for "some unknown place--deeper than dreams, more dangerous than desire."

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars We are such stuff as dreams are made on...., January 2, 2000

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Enchanted Night: A Novella (Hardcover)

Summoning the surreal white light of the past winter solstice moon, and having experienced the page turn of the century in Paris, Moscow, London New York - each like fast forwards and flashbacks to the viewing eye as the day rolled toward the Pacific ending - I found I had saved Steven Millhauser's ENCHANTED NIGHT for an eerily timed moment to savour. If ever there were a collection of images to share at such a promising time this little novella is it. Millhauser has deposited tiny thoughts like interrupted dreams that are so special that momentary awakening only pleads for us to return to the dreams. With an uncanny ecomony of words, a plethora of evocative observations, and a page-turning style of staccato images, he provides just enough literary seduction to allow the reader to fold close the book after a scant 100 odd pages, darken the lamp, and luxuriate in our own moonlight the myriad trails toward conclusions that our own dreams complete. And in Milhauser's far better words....O you who wait: this is the night of the opening of the heart.

This is an extended poem, a brief novella, a parcel of dreamdust to repeatedly read, at night, alone. Or better - to share with another child of the evening.