Synopsis
A master of literary transformation, Pulitzer Prize-winner Steven Millhauser turns his attention to the transformations of love in these three hypnotic novellas. While ostensibly showing her home to a prospective buyer, the narrator of “Revenge” unfolds an origami-like narrative of betrayal and psychic violence. In “An Adventure of Don Juan” the legendary seducer seeks out new diversion on an English country estate with devastating results. And the title novella retells the story of Tristan and Ysolt from the agonized perspective of King Mark, a husband who compulsively looks for evidence of his wife’s adultery yet compulsively denies what he finds. Combining enchantment as ancient as Sheherezade’s with up-to-the-minute acuity and unease, The King in the Tree is Millhauser at his best.
The New Yorker
An ingenious geometer of love triangles, Millhauser tinkers with tested formulas in these three novellas, while giving full rein to his taste for the fantastical. Cuckolded King Mark, in a new twist on the legend of Tristan and Isolde, commissions an automaton copy of his banished queen. Don Juan travels to an English country estate, where his playboy instincts run afoul of a quizzical Enlightenment bluestocking. In the weakest of the three novellas, a melodramatic monologue that opens the collection, a bitter widow confronts her late husband's mistress while showing her around their house as a prospective buyer. Yet, no matter how rickety the scenario, Millhauser's shrewd sense of psychology makes his characters' impulses toward romantic excess manifestly believable, as when the chivalrous Tristan realizes that "if he was going to betray at all, then he had to betray as deeply as possible."