Crazy Town

The singular stories of Steven Millhauser.

- By Charles McGrath

Steven Millhauser, whose new collection, "Disruptions" (Knopf), is out just in time for his eightieth birthday, is the great eccentric of American fiction: a sleight-of-hand artist who from time to time seems to vanish into his own work. His first novel, "Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright"-ostensibly a biography of an eleven-year-old novelist by his fifth-grade classmate-was a minor sensation when it first appeared, in 1972, and it became a cult classic. There has never been anything like it, both a parody of literary biography and a mesmerizing evocation of a small-town nineteen-fifties childhood.

Millhauser had another brush with fame in 1997, when his fourth novel, "Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer," won the Pulitzer Prize. But his second and third novels-one a portrait of a teen-age romantic and the other a fantasy set in the kingdom of Morpheus, the god of dreams-are not as memorable, and he is best known for his short stories and novellas, like the ones gathered in the new book, in which compression somehow allows his talent its fullest expression. (Millhauser has said that he likes the "fraudulent modesty" of the story, the way that, pretending not to strive for much, it actually aspires to embody the whole world.)