Customer Reviews

Little Kingdoms

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It's been a while since I've read anything by Steven Millhauser. I jumped into his short stories several years ago with the collections The Knife Thrower and The Barnum Museum, got a good feel for his style (which I liked), and moved to other books in my stack. I have certainly felt Millhauser's pull since that time, and I couldn't ignore it any longer. LITTLE KINGDOMS was an excellent choice for getting back into his work.

The three novellas comprising LITTLE KINGDOMS are thematically related, in that they all showcase how art at first replaces reality, and then assumes it. In "The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne", a newspaper cartoonist turns to animated side-projects to escape from his unsatisfying life. Millhauser works wonders with this tale, effectively capturing the spirit of comic strips and animation in the early 20th Century and bringing them to surprising life. "The Princess, the Dwarf, and the Dungeon" shows how we shape our own mythologies, and how they in turn shape us. By the end of the tale, the two perspectives are merged into an astounding whole. Finally, "Catalogue of the Exhibition: The Art of Edmund Moorash (1810 - 1846)" uses the descriptions of an artist's paintings to tell the artist's life story, and what descriptions they are. The catalogue format enables Millhauser's creativity to run free, creating objects that might be too unsettling or terrifying to view in real life. While it is not essential to read these novellas together, I feel that doing so shows how Millhauser effectively uses different styles of writing to present a single theme.

In addition, there is another common theme of relationships in distress. To go much further into this might ruin the stories, but I will say that the main characters in these three novellas do not have healthy relationships with their loved ones. But for all the problems present with the main characters, they sure do make for fascinating subjects.

The first of the three novellas that comprise this book, The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne, is by itself worth the price of admission. Unusually direct for Millhauser, the story of an obsessed cartoonist in turn of the century New York engages the emotions as well as the intellect, creating a quietly heartbreaking family portrait while vividly depicting the joys and agonies of iconoclastic creativity.

The Princess, the Dwarf, and the Dungeon is a yet another post-modern fairy tale, but after a slow start becomes quite intriguing, let down only by an overly facile conclusion.

Catalogue of the Exhibition is a brilliant idea -- the story of an artist and his circle told in the catalogue for an exhibition of his work -- and seems perfect for Millhauser, whose love for (and skill at) describing invented painting and drawing seemingly knows no bounds, yet this novella disappoints. The "Catalogue" idea seems tacked on as the entries grow to fill pages barely about the painting at hand, and the story never quite punches through the conceit. But we do get some wonderfully spooky descriptions of Lovecraftian canvases.

Millhauser's certainly an acquired taste and not for everyone, but if you've enjoyed any of his other work this collection, particularly its fine first tale, will likely please.

I've read several of Millhauser's books, and the first (and longest) novela in this book is one of my favorite. It's about a cartoonist who begins creating animations in the 1920's. He becomes more and more obsessed... wonderful descriptions of his drawings... but his interactions with his wife and daughter are touching and very sad. This story will have a lasting effect.

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.

the three novellas in this book are all very different in style and content, but written so cleverly. the 1st story is mesmerizing and the the 2nd - dark fairy story style is so surprising after it that i was instantly enchanted - loved it!

The first two novellas of this book are worth readingm but the Moorhouse collectrion descripition was, perhaps, one of the borest things I ever read. It{s difficult to understand that downslide, and why the author decide to include it in this book. But, again, you{ll get sort of trapped in the first two

With Little Kingdoms, Steven Millhauser proves his fantasy mettle once again. The three novellas, excellent in their various ways, kept me glued to the pages. Admittedly, the first story was a bit plodding (hence the four star rating), but I absolutely devoured the last half of the book.
Of Millhauser's writing: what can be said? The stories are fantastic in their simplicity, which somehow has a tendency to become sinister, dark, and compelling. This is not Millhauser's most accessible collection (The Barnum Museum or In The Penny Arcade takes that title), but for fans of the author, this is quite the treat.

This is a different pace than his other books b-c it's broken down into quick-read novellas. You sink into an almost childlike world of characters whose consuming faith in one thing allows them to create their own imaginary realities. There are so many little kingdoms within each story, and it evokes a feeling of wonder. I only gave it a 3 b-c I liked some of his other books better, but this book was really interesting, deceptively simple. Also, I disagree with the first reviewer who said the last story was a bore. It was a different pace, but I could really visualize each painting he described. It encourages the reader to use his or her own imagination

Readers of the mysterious work of Steven Millhauser are sometimes themselves a mystery. Look, for example, at some readers' extremely negative reactions to his prize-winning "Martin Dressler." What accounts for this? Perhaps this is a class of readers who trail the Pulitzer Prize committees and choose their books based only on who wins. How odd and superficial. Again and again, such know-nothings find their narrowly traditional notions of what a novel is betrayed by Millhauser. Mr. Millhauser, keep it up!