New Yorker Fiction Reviews: "Coming Soon" by Steven Millhauser

Story: "Coming Soon"

Author: Steven Millhauser

Issue: Dec. 16, 2013

My faithful readers (if there exist any of you out there) will remember Steven Millhauser's last NYer story, "Thirteen Wives," which I reviewed in the 6/8/13 entry on this blog. What's that? You don't remember??? Ah, well...

Anyway, I gushed over that story because of it's experimental style in which Millhauser painted mini portraits of thirteen imaginary wives, each of which represented a different facet of his relationship with one real woman: his wife. 

I throw around the term "magical realism" a bit too much. Mostly because I don't know what other term to use for a story like this. However, this story (and "Thirteen Wives") are not magical realist in the great Latino Literature sense of the word, but they sure as hell aren't straight up realism. Millhauser paints reality in his own colors, bends and compresses time, and creates a world with his own laws of physics, all in order to put forth a subtle point. Perhaps we would"cartoon realism" or "allegorical realism." Either way, this story functions more as a fable or an ode than an actual story, and the "point" is debatable, as it should be, but has something to do with the desire to run away from progress and whether or not that's possible. 

What Millhauser does in this story is to first paint a seemingly realistic scene: a small, progress-oriented town just outside New York City. Into this scene he inserts Levinson: a man who has come to the small town seeking refuge from the city and it's madness, but who admires the small town and its people for their industriousness. 

However, as Levinson soon realizes, the industriousness of the town and its denizens soon causes the town to turn into the very thing Levinson sought to escape. The town begins to change before his very eyes until he does not recognize it from one hour to the next, and ends up right back where he started: the city.

It's nice how Millhauser eases us into the "magical" element of this story. At first, we think it might just be about another Manhattan refugee and his cozy-yet-somehow-unfulfilled life in a small town. Millhauser turns that idea on its head, placing this Manhattan refugee in a town that is hell-bent on urbanization and progress. 

Millhauser has a good hand with these kinds of "magical symbolism" stories (did I just coin a term?). From another author, we might feel preached-to or we might see "meaning" too quickly. However, Millhauser is good about keeping the veil over our eyes until the very end, and creating a story that bears re-thinking and re-reading.