Glen Hirshberg's Blog - Posts Tagged "updike"
"A Game of Clue" by Steven Millhauser
TRUE, week of 6/24, Post #4:
At his dazzling best—as he is in so many of his short and longer stories—Steven Millhauser makes an entirely of-this-time, of-this-country mythology out of the most unlikely materials: the clockmakers and magicians and mad moonlight of fairy tales; a positively Updikean clarity and depth of insight into characters and their foibles, married to a decidedly not-Updikean charity and warmth; the sensualized fever-dreams of adolescents (and not only adolescents), rendered with their perversity but also their sense of wonder and radiance and possibility intact (as in “Clair de Lune,” when a teen who can’t sleep slips out into the suburban summer, works up the nerve to walk past the house of his crush, half-sleepwalks into her backyard…and discovers her playing whiffle ball with two girlfriends in the middle of the night); and a sense of high concept that has much more to do—again—with ghost stories or fairy tales than post-modern meta-gameplaying.
At his least successful—as he generally is, for me, in in his novels—the concepts win.
That, in the end, is the case with “A Game of Clue”, which I read this week. Half the story is a pretty fine depiction of a gently troubled family playing the title game all night on a porch to celebrate a 15 year-old’s birthday. The other, less compelling half details the wanderings and emotional musings of Colonel Mustard, Professor Plum, and the other suspects wandering the dark hallways and billiard rooms of the gameboard. The connections between game pieces and people, in the end, are tenuous, the humor in the concept itself light and repetitive, the meanderings in the mansion clever but aimless.
But even here, there are glimpses of Millhauser's magic. Oh yes. As in this heartbreaking, gorgeous moment when Colonel Mustard slips into the ballroom to continue his brutish seduction of Miss Scarlet: “The Colonel is patient; he appears to be waiting confidently for a sign from her. She asks herself suddenly: have I given him a sign? His eyes hold abysmal promises: come, I will teach you the disillusionment of the body, come, I will teach you the death of roses, the emptiness of orgasms in sun-flooded, loveless rooms.”
At his dazzling best—as he is in so many of his short and longer stories—Steven Millhauser makes an entirely of-this-time, of-this-country mythology out of the most unlikely materials: the clockmakers and magicians and mad moonlight of fairy tales; a positively Updikean clarity and depth of insight into characters and their foibles, married to a decidedly not-Updikean charity and warmth; the sensualized fever-dreams of adolescents (and not only adolescents), rendered with their perversity but also their sense of wonder and radiance and possibility intact (as in “Clair de Lune,” when a teen who can’t sleep slips out into the suburban summer, works up the nerve to walk past the house of his crush, half-sleepwalks into her backyard…and discovers her playing whiffle ball with two girlfriends in the middle of the night); and a sense of high concept that has much more to do—again—with ghost stories or fairy tales than post-modern meta-gameplaying.
At his least successful—as he generally is, for me, in in his novels—the concepts win.
That, in the end, is the case with “A Game of Clue”, which I read this week. Half the story is a pretty fine depiction of a gently troubled family playing the title game all night on a porch to celebrate a 15 year-old’s birthday. The other, less compelling half details the wanderings and emotional musings of Colonel Mustard, Professor Plum, and the other suspects wandering the dark hallways and billiard rooms of the gameboard. The connections between game pieces and people, in the end, are tenuous, the humor in the concept itself light and repetitive, the meanderings in the mansion clever but aimless.
But even here, there are glimpses of Millhauser's magic. Oh yes. As in this heartbreaking, gorgeous moment when Colonel Mustard slips into the ballroom to continue his brutish seduction of Miss Scarlet: “The Colonel is patient; he appears to be waiting confidently for a sign from her. She asks herself suddenly: have I given him a sign? His eyes hold abysmal promises: come, I will teach you the disillusionment of the body, come, I will teach you the death of roses, the emptiness of orgasms in sun-flooded, loveless rooms.”
