THE BARNUM MUSEUM
Steven Millhauser
Poseidon Press, 1990
220 pp., $19.95
Steven Millhauser is a strikingly original voice in American fiction. His first novel, Edwin Mullhouse, was published two more novels and two collections of short stories. Now is his late forties, he provides access to a world most of us lose touch with in early childhood. To visit - or revisit - this world of magic and illusion with Millhauser as guide is a thrilling and sometimes disturbing experience.
In The Barnum Museum, Muillhauser's most recent collection of short stories, the springboard into the realm of imagination is often the very ordinariness of daily life, which is at first familiar to the point of banality but soon arrives at something rich and strange.
"The Sepia Postcard" begins with the reassuringly mundane narration of its main character, who tells us that "I was tense, irritable, overworked…. Life was a foul farce with predictable punchlines; things were not going well between Claudia and me." The situation is easily recognized - a burned-out urbanite, not getting on well with his spouse, needs a vacation by the sea. "One morning he throws a suitcase into the back of the car and drives until, at dusk, he comes to the village of Broome." It all sounds very sensible, and so does he ("I expected no miracles; I wasn't young enough for dreams."), but in the little coastal town dreams do occur, in the form of visions gradually coaxed out of the isolation of his weekend retreat. Once these dreams and visions enter they grow more powerful, as unwilling to depart as the dreamer is unable to dispel them.
He checks into a guest house whose proprietor is obscurely disapproving; the weather turns cold and it begins to drizzle. The inn has no heat, the town is nearly deserted. Having sought refuge there and finding none, the narrator becomes absorbed by a sepia-tinted postcard bought in a local rare-book shop. The two figures in the old photo, at first barely discernible specks at the end of the jetty in some unknown seaside resort, become more vivid each time he glances at the postcard:
I was struck by the image as I drew the card close. I could distinguish the woman's brown iris from her darker brown pupil, and I could see her individual eyelashes. With surprise I now saw that the man faced her directly…. I detected a harshness about his expression.
When he looks at the card after dinner, the man's expression is unmistakable, his tension sharp and clear. Waking in the middle of the night, the traveler snatches the postcard and looks in anguish at the woman's terrified face, the man's mask of fury. Then he notices that the man holds a rock in his raised right hand: "I could see the tense knuckles and the tiny, carefully manicured nails."
Making choices
Horrified by the drama being played out in the old postcard, the narrator packs and leaves Broome to return to his own imperfect life in the city. The characters in other stories are not always able to make such a choice. In 'The Invention of Robert
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