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."
James Schiff
In these three peculiar albeit dazzling novellas, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Martin Dressler emphasizes the painful, even fatal consequences of love and adultery. Millhauser writes from the perspective of wronged spouses and courtly advisors who are entangled in the erotic lives of others. In "Revenge, " a simple house tour goes from friendly to ominous as the wife-narrator leads her potential buyer from room to room. "A house is a dangerous place, " she says, "kitchen knives, deadly hammers, sleeping pills, gas stoves". Soon the wife is confessing intimate details about her marriage and husband's affair as well as harping on the "other woman, " with whom the reader experiences an increasingly strange connection. Millhauser's world, like that of Italo Calvino, can be sunny and romantic, and his assured prose can enchant, haunt and beguile.
Publishers Weekly
There is nothing lighthearted about love, implies Millhauser, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Martin Dressler, in these three dark and feverishly rich novellas. While he stops short of cynicism, Millhauser's take on romance is a dark one. An excitable widow leads the reader on a tour of her house-apparently being offered for sale-in the harrowing "Revenge." As she moves from room to room, the story of her husband's extramarital affair unfolds, and it gradually becomes clear that the widow's monologue is addressed to her husband's lover-for whom she has a sinister surprise in store. "An Adventure of Don Juan" finds the famous philanderer, bored with a lifetime of easy conquests, leaving the Continent for a change of scenery on his friend's English estate, where he will experience unrequited desire for the first time. Millhauser retells the tragedy of Tristan and Isolde in the title story. Narrator Thomas of Cornwall, counselor to Isolde's cuckolded husband, King Mark, looks on in silent disapproval as Isolde and Tristan blithely carry on their affair, causing the king to suffer a storm of competing, paralyzing emotions. Millhauser's portrayal of fools and self-made victims is unblinking and unsentimental. He is particularly attuned to the ways that people fall out of love. The narrator of "Revenge" describes the moment when she realized her marriage was in trouble: "I asked myself, am I happy? And I felt a little pause." Millhauser is at his best dramatizing these moments of ambivalent hesitation and the disastrous effect they have on the "fellowships of two." Though he covers time-honored territory, Millhauser's precision, coupled with his brave imagination, makes these stories as smart and fresh as they are grim. (Feb. 24) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Three novellas on forbidden love from a Pulitzer Prize winner. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Some of the best writing of Millhauser's increasingly brilliant career (Enchanted Night , 1999, etc.) appears in this collection of three imaginative and unusual novellas. "Revenge" is an extended monologue spoken by an unnamed middle-aged woman, recently widowed, as she shows her house to another nameless woman, its prospective buyer. Every successive room and object triggers an emotional memory of her late husband, an adulterous yet doting history professor, and progressive revelations of the narrator's anger and unhappiness illuminate both the identity of her visitor and the ingenious "revenge" she has taken. It's a very clever psychological horror story, which creates out of simple declarative sentences a thickening atmosphere of menace and suspense. "An Adventure of Don Juan" brings the notorious seducer, bored with easy conquests of Venetian women, to England and the lavish estate of Juan's casual acquaintance, wealthy Augustus Hood. The estate is a private theme park, a "giant mechanism" whose parts replicate classical scenes and themes, including the entryway to Hell. And it's a place of awakening for the great lover, whose attraction to a bewitching woman (his host's sister) utterly indifferent to his charms teaches him a lesson or two about the farther reaches of amorous pleasure. Best of all is the title story, Millhauser's version of the medieval romance of Tristan and Ysolt. King Mark of Cornwall's counselor and former tutor stoically observes his cuckolded sovereign's vacillations among outrage, relief, confusion, and sorrow as continually conflicting evidence surrounds rumors hat young Queen Ysolt and the King's nephew and trusted knight Tristan are lovers. Both the forceof their passion and the inhibitions of his own honor prevent the monarch from acting, and allow the tragedy to follow its own serpentine course. It's an unforgettable dramatization of the many faces of love and loyalty. Wonderful work, from one of the authentic magic-makers.
