Though finding Millhauser’s stories to be “irresistible”, The Washington Post’s Michael Dirda can forgive those readers who may detect “an artificiality that makes them seem abstract or even lifeless.”[3]
—Millhauser is a prose poet, a creator of artifacts of the imagination, and as such is not the author for anyone looking for red-blooded American action. Very little of consequence happens in his tales; most are simply descriptions of the marvelous.[4]
Citing the title story as representative of the collection, New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani believes they suffer from a “static” quality:
While the reader delights in Mr. Millhauser's meticulously detailed descriptions, one waits and waits for something to occur. No character of any significance is introduced, no moral—save the obvious one that the imagination can be both enervating and spiritually sustaining—is ever drawn.[5]
In these works, the odd, remote, supernatural or surreal seems to be perceived as the primary substance of art, a notion that has its most popular literary incarnation in the genre of science fiction, which Millhauser flirts with and never quite embraces. This is a notion that might be argued, but in the end it may come down to a difference in taste….”[6]
Saroyan adds rhetorically: “Just how great a writer isEdgar Allan Poe?”[7]
↑ Kakutani, 1990: “Unlike the stories in his last collection, In the Penny Arcade (1986), however, they do not persuade the reader that he has much to say.”
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