The King in the Tree Book

Love at an Impasse

Three novellas, at roughly 50, 80, and 100 pages each. All have to do with adultery. All three explore a curious state of stasis, where passion is undiminished, but no further move seems possible, a kind of amatory checkmate. The two longer stories, in addition, revisit operatic characters'from Mozart's Don Giovanni and Wagner's Tristan and Isolde'or rather the original myths on which those operas were based. While the first story is good, the other two are the real reason for buying the book.

The first story, "Revenge," is contemporary. A garrulous woman is showing her house to a buyer, shortly after the death of her husband. As she proceeds through the various rooms'front hall, living room, downstairs bath, kitchen'she reveals more about her twenty-two-year marriage, and it soon becomes clear that the potential buyer is by no means a random stranger. I won't say more, because the way in which Millhauser gradually reveals information is a large part of his cleverness. Except to say that, although he appears to be setting up a number of melodramatic scenarios, he eventually leads to a far more subtle outcome.

The second piece, "An Adventure of Don Juan," is richer and more complex, clearly a novella rather than a mere story. It also shows Millhauser's power with words, when he chooses to pull out all the stops (though the quality of his writing is such that he rarely needs to do so). But when Don Juan is Venice, Millhauser matches the baroque decadence word for word:
What bound him was the shimmer of the place, the sense of a world given over to duplication and dissolution: the stone steps going down into the water and joining their own reflection seemed to invite you down into a watery kingdom of forbidden desires, while the water trembling in ripples of light on the stone facades and the arches of ancient bridges turned the solid world into nothing but air and light, an illusion, a wizard's spell. It was a fragile, trembling world that might vanish at any moment'and perhaps that was the secret of the feverish life that began at night, when women wearing the masks of wolves and birds of prey beckoned from passing gondolas, while torchlight rippled in the black water and dark figures disappeared into doorways. Venetian women were out for pleasure, and Don Juan had bedded so many of them that he sometimes had the sense that Venice was an immense brothel composed of watery corridors and floating bedrooms hung with murky mirrors and paintings of swooning women ravished by centaurs.But Juan is bored, and accepts the invitation of a rich English gentleman to stay with him on his country estate. And in that limpid landscape, he is hosted by two elegant ladies: his host's wife and her unmarried sister. Of course, he intends to bed them both, but (to his growing surprise) does not immediately do so. Meanwhile, the place exerts its own magic, a kind of eighteenth-century theme park. In this, Millhauser has perfectly caught the spirit of the age. His host, Augustus Hood, is not only a keen landscape gardener, transforming portions of his estate into replicas of famous places in history, art, and myth, but also an inventor and impresario, filling it with mechanical animals and actors hired to play the appropriate roles. And underlying all this is a serious discussion of whether man's ability to design this simulacrum of nature is proof or disproof of the existence of a Great Designer in charge of the whole world.

Gottfried von Strassburg's story of Tristan and Isolde will be most familiar through the Wagner opera. Sir Tristan is sent by his uncle King Mark of Cornwall to fetch Isolde from Ireland as his bride. After accidentally drinking a love potion, they cannot resist their passion, and when their midnight tryst is discovered in the second act, Tristan is mortally wounded. He goes to his home in Brittany, but dies just before Isolde arrives to join him. Millhauser omits the love potion entirely, and spends almost the whole story expanding on events behind the scenes in Wagner's Act II: the couple's attempts to conceal their love, the growing suspicion in King Mark's court, and the King's reluctance to believe the worst. [He tells this, incidentally, through the eyes of the King's chief adviser, Thomas of Britain, who in fact was the earliest-known author of the Tristan legend, and (though only fragments remain) the presumed source for Gottfried.] It is a long, mesmerizing story, without any obvious crescendo, but with many small movements, an ebb and flow in the balance between the three characters, Tristan, Ysolt, and Mark, all of whom are so bound by love and respect for one another that no resolution seems possible. Although the ending of the story is roughly the same, Millhauser's version of Tristan's wound is quite different, once more avoiding the kind of dramatic climax that one might expect.

Indeed, whatever their actual length, all three pieces seem a little long for their content. But I now believe that their length is their content. Millhauser is not interested in a story as an arrow headed straight for its target, but rather as something suspended in mid-air, barely moving at all. The cover illustration is not very well drawn, but if you see it as the reflection of a person's face in the water with a leaf floating on its surface, it would be the perfect equivalent of Millhauser's hypnotic stasis. I have only encountered it once or twice before in literature: in Maurice Maeterlinck's Pelleas and Melisande, in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (and in the semi-comic "Tristan" story he wrote as a kind of preview of it), in some of the mythological stories of A. S. Byatt and Angela Carter, and most especially in Julien Gracq's extraordinary neo-medieval novella, The Castle of Argol. Millhauser is in distinguished company.