Millhauser has long been fond of investigating fads and manias. In one of the new stories, people become obsessed with climbing ladders until one fellow disappears into the sky. In another, people start to live high up on columns. “They are in fact our sons and daughters, our friends and neighbors,” the narrator says. “They have left us and will never return. We do not really know what they are doing up there.”
“Theater of Shadows” is about a citizenry that turns against the notion of color itself. “Green” is about a town that gets rid of its lawns and trees, only to long for them back. In each of these, you half expect Rod Serling to ride through on a motorcycle.
The longest and most insinuating story is “The Little People.” It’s about a town in which a not-insignificant segment of the populace is two inches tall. They mostly live in their own development. They have banks and shopping malls and colleges. So many things are a danger to them that they are as fierce as the Mossad. They can tie up, with wire, a marauding squirrel in seconds.
There is a scene in “Gulliver’s Travels” in which Gulliver, among the Brobdingnagians, strolls on the nipples of certain young ladies of the court. In Millhauser’s story, a little man, lean and muscular but as cute as a piece of gnocchi, falls in love with a regular-size woman. The sex writing approaches Nicholson Baker levels.
He liked to climb naked onto one or the other of her breasts as she lay naked on her back; once on top, he would seat himself on the areola and embrace the nipple with his legs. Holding the sides of the nipple with the palms of both hands, he would rub his face back and forth across the sides and top, rousing her to shuddering paroxysms that she had never dreamed possible. We know less about how he satisfied his own strong desire. From hints in his diary, it appears that he liked to lie on her stomach and make love to her navel.
In another scene, a naked little woman slides down a large man’s ear, to apparently profound effect.
Millhauser pushes this story into the realm of social politics. Little things become fashionable. People suddenly long to be short, and “small penises are the envy of locker rooms.” Because the little people are hard to hear, loudness becomes unfashionable.