Unsettling Tales Of Strange Suburbia Echo Through 'The Night'

Transcript

ARUN RATH, HOST:

From Edgar Allen Poe to Salman Rushdie, I love writers who can combine reality and the supernatural in a way that's really effective and really literary. The new collection of stories by Pulitzer Prize winner Steven Millhauser is a tour de force display of a writer who's mastered that approach. A town experiencing a bizarre suicide epidemic, a mysterious traveling salesman who sells a magical elixir sound odd when I say it, but reading Millhauser, it all seems plausible, even mundane. So I turned to him to describe one of my favorite stories called "Mermaid Fever."

STEVEN MILLHAUSER: A mermaid has washed-up on the shore of a small Connecticut town and is first suspected of not being a mermaid. Scientific tests are done; it is a mermaid. Crowds come and look at it. And it's - the story studies the effect of this odd, unreal, but scientifically-approved creature that is simply sitting there - a dead, affirmed mermaid.

RATH: So I realized just literally moments before doing this interview to confirm my memory - and it's correct. I first read your work in 1984 in Twilight Zone Magazine.

MILLHAUSER: That's astonishing.

RATH: (Laughter) Yeah.

MILLHAUSER: I can't even remember having published anything in Twilight Zone Magazine.

RATH: It was a very short-run magazine that published, I guess, what would be called strange fiction, I guess, for lack of a better term. What would be a way you'd describe this collection of stories?

MILLHAUSER: Embracing the familiar and the every day. I like to do that and then swerve away a little bit. I don't think there's any word for that, unless you want to call me a swerve-ist.

RATH: So many of these tails involve things which are, you know - they're disturbing and awful things that are happening in the context of this small town.

MILLHAUSER: What's wrong with me I sometimes say to myself.

(LAUGHTER)

RATH: I would say, well, what is wrong with you? But what is it with that, you know? That does come up a lot - these small towns. And there are creepy and disturbing things that are happening.

MILLHAUSER: I suppose that's true. I feel like denying it but, in fact, my imagination does work that way. As a rule, I like the idea of beginning with something common, ordinary, and introducing something somewhat unusual and then pushing, pushing, pushing and seeing what happens.

RATH: You have in this book some takes - sort of your retellings of myths and fairytales - one of Rapunzel, which is just amazing.

MILLHAUSER: Here's a fairytale that has haunted me since early childhood. I love it.

RATH: What is it about the Rapunzel tale that's always - that's fascinated you?

MILLHAUSER: I think as a child, it simply terrified me - being captured by a frightening person and being taken away. As an adult, what interests me is the fact that someone is taken away to a safe place. The sorceress is not a cruel person. She is cruel from a domestic point of view, but she wants to save this girl from the troubles of the world. And she creates an ideal environment where no one can harm her, which creates restlessness and disturbance in Rapunzel. And I see that connected to the perfect world that the father of Gautama arranges for him in order to protect him from a destiny that the father fears for his son.

RATH: This is Gautama the Buddha...

MILLHAUSER: Yes.

RATH: ...Whose story you also tell in a tale in this book.

MILLHAUSER: Right. And I don't care about that part of it; I look only at the early part, where he's a young prince.

RATH: Pre-enlightenment Buddha.

MILLHAUSER: Pre-enlightenment, living in a privileged, perfect world in which all signs of trouble, death, disease are carefully excluded so that he will be happy. That's what his father wants for him, because of a prophecy that his son will leave and become an enlightened one and not rule the kingdom.

So there is an odd connection between Prince Gautama and Rapunzel, and in a way some of the little characters in these small American towns who live in safe, rather lovely environments and become restless, want more, are disrupted by something from the outside world that strikes them.

RATH: Those are, you know, two stories familiar to me from the time I was a child, but I've never connected the Buddha and Rapunzel before. It's wonderful stuff. Steven Millhauser's new short story collection is called "Voices In The Night." Steven Millhauser, thank you very much.

MILLHAUSER: And thank you. I enjoyed it. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.