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A review by thestarlesscasea
Enchanted Night by Steven Millhauser
4.0
This is a very strange little book. It's not one of my all-time favorites or anything, but I think the eerie vibes and unique, lonely characters will stick with me for some time.
The book is essentially a novella in the form of a series of vignettes about a variety of characters in a little town in Connecticut that is having a very strange, "enchanted night." A mannequin comes to life and connects with a human admirer, children are being led by a pied piper figure, a gang of young women break into the home of an older woman who is so lonely she excitedly offers them lemonade.
I don't read many books by older white men anymore like I used to have to in school, so there were some jarring moments of objectification of women and some sexual content that felt a little...off? I had to tell my book club friends about one vignette in which a young man is asleep on his lawn, and a moon goddess comes down and has sex with him, which is of course sexual assault but is not framed that way here. Millhauser writes, "she stiffens his love-lance with her hand," and I laughed out loud because that is terrible.
Still, I'm a sucker for strange happenings to strange people in a strange town over the course of a strange night, and this is a nice quick read. I recommend reading it in one sitting if you can, because I read it in a few sittings and had a somewhat hard time keeping track of the large cast of characters.
The book is essentially a novella in the form of a series of vignettes about a variety of characters in a little town in Connecticut that is having a very strange, "enchanted night." A mannequin comes to life and connects with a human admirer, children are being led by a pied piper figure, a gang of young women break into the home of an older woman who is so lonely she excitedly offers them lemonade.
I don't read many books by older white men anymore like I used to have to in school, so there were some jarring moments of objectification of women and some sexual content that felt a little...off? I had to tell my book club friends about one vignette in which a young man is asleep on his lawn, and a moon goddess comes down and has sex with him, which is of course sexual assault but is not framed that way here. Millhauser writes, "she stiffens his love-lance with her hand," and I laughed out loud because that is terrible.
Still, I'm a sucker for strange happenings to strange people in a strange town over the course of a strange night, and this is a nice quick read. I recommend reading it in one sitting if you can, because I read it in a few sittings and had a somewhat hard time keeping track of the large cast of characters.