If an author is lucky, his work lives on in ruins. Posterity preserves a few pullquotes to stand for the whole; moviemakers, arrivistes that they are, curate and bequeath these galleries with bullying benevolence. For instance, Steven Millhauser is “the author of ‘Eisenheim the Illusionist',” from whence comes Neil Burger’s The Illusionist, its pulsating romance, its percolating political unrest and its Shocking Twist! Millhauser’s story has but the faintest murmurings of love and politics: Eisenheim, whose act climaxes with his own permanent disappearance, seems to exist only onstage. (“In 1898 he opened his own theater in Vienna, called simply Eisenheimhaus, or The House of Eisenheim, as if that were his real home and all other dwellings illusory.”)

As for Millhauser, his world extends only to the margins of the page. His 1972 debut novel Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright is a biography of a literary genius who died on his 11th birthday, as told by his next-door neighbor and playmate. His art is a “shaping frame” for the world. His death, following the completion of his nigh-unread opus Cartoons, is another frame, effectively containing his existence within the space of his book. “[T]he thingness of speech,” is key to Edwin’s work, we’re told (via narration that’s less unreliable than a how-was-school-today tall tale), so that speech isn’t an armless statue in a museum with a plaque to fill in the context, but an indivisible and all-encompassing entity in itself. “In the beginning was silence, womb of all words which all words seek... Edwin once agreed with me that the ideal order of words on a page creates in the ideal reader an ideal silence... ” It’s a bit like Plato’s Cave, ideal forms flickering across the walls of our memory, waiting to be held in place by the magic combination of syllables.

Millhauser’s syntax is ornate, his descriptions precise and exhaustive; many of his passages are inventory storehouses of nostalgic imagery: suburban living rooms, elementary school classrooms, amusement parks, candy stores. Flicking a Viewfinder through scenes from postwar Americana, and childhood, Edwin Mullhouse’s exactitude strives to recapture “the thingness” of social and personal memory. Language is both vehicle for and hindrance to the totality of experience: “[Edwin] became obsessed by the notion that there was a name for everything; perhaps he felt that the world contained a finite number of things and to learn the names of all of them was to define the universe.”

Dangerous Laughter, Millhauser’s new short story collection, considers art of all sorts as a kind of vocabulary: if we knew how to make from it the perfect “shaping frame,” we might contain infinity. The book’s first frame is perhaps its most unlikely. Opener “Cat ‘n’ Mouse”––like the stand-alone chapter that opens the earlier novel’s second section––is a scene-by-scene narration of a cartoon battle between a scheming, bumbling predator and its cunning prey, who “stands flat against the doorjamb, facing the living room, his eyes darting left and right. One leg tiptoes delicately around the jamb. His stretched body snaps after it like a rubber band.” See it? It’s a matter of finding “the ideal order of words” to describe the cartoon tropes, and thus conjuring in the ideal reader their own warm memories of ideal Saturday mornings. Finally, though, the Tom and Jerry grammar leads, like Eisenheim’s music hall trickery, to an absolute conclusion: the mouse takes his handkerchief and rubs out first the cat, then himself. That’s all, folks.

Following this “Opening Cartoon,” each of the book’s three subsequent sections, comprised of four stories each, depict the construction of world maps, expanding (as in the Borges and Bioy-Casares parable) towards a scale of 1:1. The tales in “Vanishing Acts” tell not of Hapsburg Vienna but of townships whose perma-50s iconography (maple trees, girls in rolled-up jeans, driveway basketball) glows like Edwin Mullhouse’s Crayola-green suburban lawns. For Millhauser, anywhere might provide a stage grand enough, a frame expansive enough, a page perfect enough, to contain everything. The section ends with “History of a Disturbance,” whose narrator finds speech inadequate. “Words interfere with the world,” he says:

I saw a whitish thing on the kitchen table. In that instant the whitishness on the white table was mysterious, ungraspable. It seemed to spill onto the table like a fluid… A moment later everything changed. I recognized a cup, a simple white cup. The word pressed it into shape, severed it––as if with the blow of an axe––from everything that surrounded it. There it was: a cup. I wondered what it was I’d seen before the word tightened around it.