[Below, Kakutani reviews several of Millhauser's short story collections, praising the writing style but finding several of the stories lacking in character or plot development.]

To read Steven Millhauser's fiction is to enter a fairy-tale kingdom of "the mysterious, the magical, the unexpected." Like his earlier books (In the Penny Arcade, From the Realm of Morpheus), The Barnum Museum is crammed full with amazing events, perplexing characters, strange exercises in sleight of hand. A magician conjures up the head of a girl named Greta, who takes on a life of her own ("Eisenheim the Illusionist"). A merchant sailor visits a distant country that is besieged by a giant bird ("The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad"). A lonely, unhappy man buys a postcard that slowly comes to life ("The Sepia Postcard").

Nearly all the stories in this collection are concerned with two worlds (the familiar, sunlit world of everyday life and the dark, intriguing world of the imagination) and the boundaries that lie between them. In "Alice, Falling"—a kind of annotation of the first chapter of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland—the heroine notices that a change comes about as she falls down the rabbit hole: "the mysterious shaft or vertical tunnel through which she is falling begins to seem familiar to her, with its cupboards, its shelves, its lamplit bumps and hollows, while the upper world grows shadowy and strange; and as she falls she has to remind herself that somewhere far above, suddenly the air is blinding blue, white-and-yellow daisies grow in a green field, on a sloping bank her sister sits reading in sun-checked shade."

"Behind the Blue Curtain" and the title story of this collection similarly delineate the world of wonders that lies just on the other side of our workaday world. In the first, Mr. Millhauser uses the metaphor of a movie theater, taking us behind the screen to reveal a backstage realm in which characters step out of their film roles to hold conversations with one another. In the next, he compares the realm of the imagination to a fantastical museum—a museum of infinite rooms, wings and exhibits, which like Jorge Luis Borges's famous library contains all the secrets of the universe.

Though this museum is enjoyed by children and boasts many joyful diversions (a flying carpet, a winged horse, leprechauns, jugglers and peanut vendors), there is a darker, more sinister aspect to it as well. There are said to be subterranean levels in the museum presided over by bands of swarthy dwarfs, and black caverns containing "disturbing creatures dangerous to behold." Visitors can easily become lost in the museum, and those who completely succumb to its seductive charms often lose touch with their real lives, abandoning everything they know and love to wander its many towers and halls.

"If the Barnum Museum is a little suspect, if something of the sly and gimcrack clings to it always, that is simply part of its nature, a fact among other facts. We may doubt the museum, but we do not doubt our need to return. For we are restless, already we are impatient to move through the beckoning doorways, which lead to rooms with other doorways that give dark glimpses of distant rooms, distant doorways, unimaginable discoveries."

The problem with this story, like many in this collection, is that it's almost completely static. While the reader delights in Mr. Millhauser's meticulously detailed descriptions, one waits and waits for something to occur. No character of any significance is introduced, no moral—save the obvious one that the imagination can be both enervating and spiritually sustaining—is ever drawn. Instead, we are simply given a laundry list (albeit a prettily written laundry list) of marvels, most of them already highly familiar to us from mythology, fairy tales and the works of other writers.

"The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad" even more pointedly recycles earlier tales, namely the adventures of Sinbad the Sailor as recounted in the Arabian Nights, though it does so in the guise of providing a commentary on the nature of storytelling. "Alice, Falling" does little more than embroider Lewis Carroll's well-known story with some of Alice's own musings. And "The Invention of Robert Herendeen" simply gives the Frankenstein story a predictable twist, turning the man-made monster into a pretty girl. Such exercises convince the reader that Mr. Millhauser can write. Unlike the stories in his last collection (In the Penny Arcade), however, they do not persuade the reader that he has much to say.

Fortunately, several other tales in this volume evince a little more originality. "Eisenheim the Illusionist" recounts the story of a turn of the century magician capable of inventing people out of thin air, and it becomes a resonant fairy tale about the unreckoned consequences of art.

"A Game of Clue" similarly explores the connections between the real world and the world of fiction by using the anxieties and concerns of a family playing the board game Clue as counterpoint to the anxieties and concerns of the characters in the game (Mrs. Peacock, Miss Scarlet, Mr. Green, Colonel Mustard etc.). In this tale, Mr. Millhauser demonstrates his proven talent for inventing fanciful, fairytale-like characters, but at the same time he also displays—for the first and only time in this volume—an ability to conjure up some believable flesh-and-blood human beings. It's a skill he might well want to explore further.