SOURCE: Fowler, Douglas. “Steven Millhauser, Miniaturist.” Critique 37, no. 2 (winter 1996): 139-48.

In an essay he calls “The Fascination of the Miniature,” Steven Millhauser writes, “We inhabit a universe so utterly alien that to look steadily at that blaze of darkness would burn out the eyes of the mind” (33). He continues: “The miniature … is an attempt to reproduce the universe in graspable form. It represents a desire to possess the world more completely, to banish the unknown and the unseen. We are teased out of the world of terror and death, and under the enchantment of the miniature we are invited to become God” (34).

These are startling, even melodramatic words to use in a discursive essay on the esthetics of size and imitation, but they offer a useful caption to describe one aspect of Millhauser's strange and singular kingdom of words, his “graspable” version of the universe.

Millhauser is a verbal miniaturist par excellence, and this sets him apart from almost all his contemporaries. In a literary culture poised to reward art in the service of the big issues of social amelioration and sexual politics, Millhauser's imaginative constructs are exquisite, apolitical, socially indifferent—unmistakably art for art's sake, miniatures created solely to accept that heady invitation to “become God.” Or really to usurp God: “A work of fiction is a radical act of the imagination whose sole purpose is to supplant the world,” one of Millhauser's fictional spokesmen tells us. “In order to achieve this purpose, a work of fiction is willing to use all the means at its disposal, including the very world it is plotting to annihilate. Art imitates Nature as Judas imitates Christ” (Portrait of a Romantic 23).

To Millhauser, an artist's Judas-kingdom is not merely an imitation of the world that imprisons us; it is an alternative to it, promising escape from that “terror and death.” But the artist cannot finally escape into this alternative world. Not only will the universe he has impudently attempted to usurp have the final say, but his own imagination will finally fail him: “For the truth is, I am still not satisfied,” Millhauser continues in his essay on the fascination of the very small. “Is it perhaps not enough to be God?”

Again and again Millhauser tells the tale of the artist as Icarus, doomed to a cycle of impudent fabrication, momentary flight, ultimate destruction. He seems to hold that, at the center of things, the imagination cannot be content even with its own God-like constructs, and that human beings seem to be, finally and irrevocably, subject to an “unfulfilled yearning” in our attempts to complete ourselves in a world that can never accommodate us even when that world is self-constructed: “we do not fit in anywhere” (“Miniature” 34).

It would be hard to imagine any writer's thematic concerns being larger or more difficult to portray than these—issues, after all, portentous enough to occupy Joyce and Nabokov and Pynchon and the other fiercely playful originals who transformed the literary art of our century by treating the assumptions of their predecessors like a quaint little pile of stereopticon slides. But because Millhauser is also by instinct a miniaturist as well as a theoretician, he has chosen to dramatize his aesthetic concerns within a few square miles of mid-century suburban Connecticut and has selected for his God-usurping artificers a cast of grade-school kids and adolescent bookworms. Strange mix, all this, an eerie intermingling of the philosophically enormous and the domestically banal. It is a world that demands our most sensitive attention.

In Millhauser's first novel, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright (and every aspect of that multilayered title proves to be significant), the narrator gives us the quicksilver essence of Millhauser's own method. Commenting on the late Edwin Mullhouse's “immortal masterpiece,” the novel Cartoons (completed during the bedtime hours of Edwin's fourth-grade year), Edwin's dry and ultra-reasonable classmate-biographer Jeffrey Cartwright points out that Edwin consciously chose the animated movie cartoon as the vehicle for his art precisely because of its quality of “repellent cuteness.” Jeffrey argues that it is just this quality of repellent cuteness that is appropriate to an American artist at this historical moment, holding that Edwin's achievement is to have “discovered Beauty not in the merely commonplace, not in the merely ugly, not in the merely malodorous and disgusting, but in the lowest of the low, in the vilest of the vile: in the trivial, in the trite, in the repellently cute” (267).

Miniature artist, miniature art object, materials of tritest Pop culture—but real Beauty. Time after time, this is the marrow of Millhauser's procedure. As Nabokov has his spokesman Humbert Humbert say for him: “We all admire the spangled acrobat with classical grace meticulously walking his tightrope in the talcum light; but how much rarer art there is in the sagging rope expert wearing scarecrow clothes and impersonating a grotesque drunk!” (251).

And also at the core of that fiction is a unique insight, particular to Millhauser: the destructiveness of the artistic impulse. He holds that the forces of creation that an artist expresses outwardly in his art invisibly lay waste resources within. The artist is commandeered and exploited and finally betrayed by his own gift, which uses him like cancer occupying a healthy cell.

Again and again, Millhauser gives us the story of an artistic impulse that, once released from its confinement, possesses and exploits and finally devastates the artist doomed by his genius to have summoned it up into the world. In reading Millhauser, it is well to remember that genius and genie are at root the same word. Again and again, the story beneath the story is not that of an artist expressing himself through the medium of his art, but of an art expressing itself through the medium of an artist—and consuming him in the process.

Thus, Edwin Mullhouse, now abandoned by his “immortal masterpiece” after he has completed Cartoons, kills himself on his eleventh birthday rather than face a life of post-partum anticlimax. In a later novella, Millhauser gives us the story of a painter, Edmund Moorash (and notice the similarity of the names Millhauser has chosen for his trespasser-heroes), who not only creates a dangerous art object with canvas and brush and pigment (“a painting is a dagger aimed at the heart,” Moorash explains), but himself dies along with three others as that painting comes to express a malignant counter-life of its own.

In a short story called “Eisenheim the Illusionist,” a Faustian magician disappears into some sort of adjacent space-time continuum he has conjured up on the first day on the twentieth century, “out of the crumbling order of history into the indestructible realm of mystery and dream” (237). The narrator of Millhauser's 1986 novel From The Realm of Morpheus journeys like Lewis Carroll's Alice down into a bizarre shadow-kingdom of dream and art-impulse, the wellspring of our daylight imaginative life. And in the short story “Snowmen,” a tale set amidst a school-closing Connecticut winter storm, the snow itself is soon transformed into astonishing sculptures of enchanted origin, some of them created by the narrator himself as he is possessed by startling new powers of artistic creation (“My hands were inspired, it was as if I were coaxing into shape a form that longed to spring forth from the fecund snow” [128]); many more snow-forms simply appear magically out of the night, and on the third day after the great snowfall, “our snowmen began to achieve freedoms so dangerous that they threatened to burn out the eyes of the beholders” (132). Like the imaginings that possess Edwin Mullhouse, Edmund Moorash, and the magician Eisenheim, the snow-forms in their ultimate apotheosis become indescribable, dangerous manifestations of “shadowy inner realms … these spiritual forms, disdaining the earth, seemed scarcely to be composed of white substance, as if they were striving to escape from the limits of snow itself. … I felt in that last rapture of snow a lofty and criminal striving, and all my senses seemed to dissolve in the dark pleasures of transgression” (132).

In every instance, fantasy-energies seem to breed secretly behind the fragile scrim of reality itself, waiting their moment. When these energies are called over into our world by presumptuous Faustus-artists, the collision is destructive in the extreme. Thus, Eisenheim the Illusionist stands for all of Millhauser's artists as he summons unearthly “objects into existence by the sheer effort of his mind … returning the spectator to the troubled heart of magic, which yearned beyond the constricting world of ingenuity and artifice toward the dark realm of transgression” (Barnum [The Barnum Museum] 229).

Maturity is what we do with our disappointments, and so paradoxically the genius-artist must despise and resist maturity above all other conditions. The artist must never grow up—or, really, grow down. As Edwin's biographer tells us, “we have all been geniuses, you and I; but sooner or later it is beaten out of us, the glory faded, and by the age of seven most of us are nothing but wretched little adults. So that genius, more accurately, is the retention of the capacity to be obsessed” (75).

The artist in his heightened and empowering obsession sees beneath the banal surface of things—beneath the Monopoly board, the alarm clock, the school bus, the white paste and colored paper and round-pointed scissors of the third-grade classroom—and includes us as imaginative participants in his dream. Nietzsche said that “underneath this reality in which we live and have our being, another and altogether different reality lies concealed.” The artist conducts us into the presence of a world papered over with the assumptions of reason, habit, and sheer inattention, and teaches us how to repossess “the forgotten strangeness of things,” as Jeffrey Cartwright calls the world beneath the world that is a “dark misty realm wherein things cease to have definite and distinct shapes, and the very notion of a real world seems a scrupulous distortion, a specious clarity and hardness imposed on mists and shadows …” (266).

Few writers have evoked the “specious clarity and hardness” of quotidian American reality with the brilliance that Millhauser commands. His powers of recall and description are so remarkable and the evocativeness of his surfaces is so rich and detailed that the mythic energies animating them are often not immediately apparent. But we must grasp the importance of the myth beneath the mask if we are to fully comprehend Millhauser's fiction.

For example, Edwin Mullhouse's talent and fate are given shape by his relationship to three figures in his life, children themselves: Edward Penn, a neurasthenic muralist of comic-book characters who teaches Edwin the uses of a self-created artistic microworld; Arnold Hasselstrom, a Caliban-like misfit who will teach Edwin violence, and who will die, as the violent will, of gunfire; and Rose Dorn, a grade-school witch with a black kitten who will teach him all about unrequited love and about suicide, and who will die, as witches will, of fire.

Dornroschen—the story of Sleeping Beauty—is a dark fairy tale to which Millhauser will return again and again, especially in his second novel, Portrait of a Romantic. In Edwin Mullhouse the tale is incarnated in Edwin's second-grade classmate, for he is “deathly in love”—literally deathly in love—with a classmate whose name is by no mere coincidence Rose Dorn. But parody will become tragedy.

Millhauser describes Rose Dorn with such amusing vivacity that her role in the creation of Edwin's art and self-destruction is at first easy to underestimate. “Her favorite dress was a short bright red one with puffed sleeves, from which her short solid arms hung down alertly, as if she were perpetually prepared to snatch your crayons” (127), Jeffrey tells us; and of course we recognize the social type from our collective memories of grade-school without at first seeing the myth that lives beneath Millhauser's representation of surface appearance. A disruptive student with a streak of sadism and a dangerous sense of self-contempt, a cheater, and a noisy show-off tries not to win Edwin's heart the way that, say, Becky Thatcher wins Tom Sawyer's. This is not the comic enslavement of the sentimental grade-school crush we could find on a vintage Saturday Evening Post cover or a situation comedy on prime-time television. Rose is possessed, literally possessed, and Millhauser is animating the trite materials of Pop culture into a magical story of love and death. “There was something wrong with her, we all knew that; she was like a page on which a waterdrop has dried, leaving a faint ripple” (128).

That “faint ripple” is nothing less than an inexorable death-intending destiny having nothing to do with human psychopathology and everything to do with extra-human magic: Rose will die in her own strange black fairy tale castle with its barrier of “thorny black roadside bushes” (parodically suggestive, of course, of the knight-slaying thorns that enclose Sleeping Beauty in her century of dreamless enchantment). The little blond witch is killed in a fire she sets to destroy herself and her witchlike mother: “She died horribly but dramatically,” Jeffrey tells us dryly, “clamoring for attention even in her end; and her death spread through Edwin like an infection” (128).

Millhauser has created such a real-seeming surface of personality, appearance, and social detail that the dark affinity between Rose Dorn and Edwin Mullhouse—the “infection” her suicide breeds in him—seems at first a clash of tone, like a few frames of Rosemary's Baby inexplicably spliced into an Andy Hardy film. But Millhauser is really creating a story with its animating energies subtly transplanted from the Brothers Grimm. Parody is an almost-sincere form of homage.

For instance, it is no accident that on one of her last days alive Rose Dorn interrupts the class recitation of the Lord's Prayer with her tardy arrival: “Everyone knew that this interruption of the Lord's Prayer was sinful, hideous, and exciting …” (178). But Rose finds the mild profanation deeply satisfactory: “She was in one of her dreamy moods, gazing off with a strange light in her eyes.” And even as Rose and her mother are consumed in flames at their dark and terrible home two days later, Mrs. Cadwallader, the schoolteacher, leads the school prayer “with her eyes wide open; she seemed indeed to be enlisting the Lord in her struggle against Rose Dorn. It was shortly after the play period that we heard the fire engines” (179).

Even if the invisible forces from outside the boundaries of nature are far less obvious here than they would be in, say, a Stephen King, Ira Levin, or Anne Rice novel, Millhauser's story is no less magic-driven. The crucial presence of magic sets his work apart from fiction of realistic intention. Millhauser is a fabulist disguised as a realist and a parodist, and an instructive contrast might be made between Millhauser's fiction and the fiction of John Updike in order to point up the distinction between a fabulist disguised as a realist and a realist, warts and all.

Although Millhauser (born in 1943) is about a decade younger than Updike (born in 1932), the America that both draw on for a social and psychic backdrop is essentially similar: the educated middle-class WASP Northeast, with the reticences of the Puritan heritage implicit in its human relationships and its institutional values and public beliefs shaped by the great continuing emergencies of the Depression, the Second World War, the Korean War, the Cold War.

In Memories of the Ford Administration, for example, Updike has his alter ego, Alfred Clayton, divorced Ph.D. historian and (blocked) biographer of President James Buchanan, nervously passing through the student union of what was still in 1976 a women's college. Clayton has no professional reason to be going through the Student Center after dark: he is sexually on the prowl: “I was cruising it” (195).

Updike-Clayton's description of the Student Center is characteristic of Updike's sensibility—in fact, the author barely bothers to project himself into another personality at all. As with so many of the analytical episodes in Updike's fiction, the passage quoted below is primarily a social description, almost an anthropological analysis; and although it is prose charged with a showy, urbane brilliance of metaphor, analogy, and descriptive trope, the content of the scene that this prose portrays remains clearly in the realm of received actuality.

“Even on Saturday nights the lounge was what my father's jocosely male-chauvinist generation would have called a hen party,” the narrative voice assures us.

—a gynous concentration, in torn jeans, sloganned T-shirts, and grubby salt-and-slush-soaked sneakers, emitting a high-pitched babble and a subliminal scent that bombarded my pheromone receptors with as much radiation as if I were a Ukrainian peasant on the day Chernobyl let loose … The aroma of a hundred young females lying sprawled and jabbering, munching and straw-sucking and with loud excessive animation presenting their cases, their agendas, their hopes and disappointments to one another like so many amateur actresses trying out for the starring role—this scent is an avenue to truth, historical truth as it has become, with the passage of a decade and a half. A nobler teacher, it may be, would have sensed only their minds; his thoughts would have flown to what lay between their ears rather than between their legs and erected fantasies about their term papers and future professions. But it was not clear, in the Ford era, that Woman's proper destiny was to toil on Wall Street or fly a helicopter into Iraq—there was still in the air, left over from the lotus-eating Sixties, a belief that being, not doing, was the point of it all and that psychosexual fulfillment, in a practical form as vague as possible, was the aim of education.

(194-195)

The descriptive authority of this passage derives from Updike's comprehension of the American historical moment as well as from the genial, vivacious accuracy of his surface reportage. Notice that we are not only invited inside the sensibility of a specific middle-aged male professor not-quite-guiltily hoping to exploit his position for what might primly be called “sensual advantage” (indeed, it turns out that Professor Clayton manages a one-night stand, but with the mother of one of his students); but we are also invited outside the specifics of the scene itself to see the historical-social forces that express themselves in it, as inexorable in their presence as the forces of gravity or electromagnetism that define (to our intermittent astonishment) any and every measure of the actual universe in which we find ourselves when we are not reading fiction.

There is no super-nature here in Updike's narrative universe, no myth, no enchanted world older than our own. The depth of the scene is provided by human history, pure and simple—or pure and complicated. But no matter how much fancywork of idiom, irony, minor comedy, and reference he sets in front of us, Updike's essential realism still connects this local moment solely to the historical curve of human activity, not to a shadow-realm of the uncanny. At his most characteristic, Updike writes fiction as history, a history realized (in the root meaning of that word) in a particular life. In fact, the majority of the highly regarded American writers of our era use the magic world solely as a source of imagery, heightening language with the miraculous but not abandoning actuality itself as the floor of the narrative.

In contrast, Millhauser's fictional miniatures, like all good miniatures, only look like reality—they are essentially fabulous. This predilection for the fabulous and self-delightedly artificial stands in sharp contrast to the lion's share of American stories and novels published in the last ten to fifteen years, for current fiction is almost always at pains to present itself as naturalistic in subject matter and plainspoken in technique, and it will almost never admit to an originating impulse deriving from literature itself. But it would be difficult to name a writer more exotic, fey, perversely playful, allusive, literary, structurally elaborate, and philosophically speculative than Millhauser.

Technically, American fiction of the 1980s and 1990s has been less experimental than was the highly regarded fiction of the 1960s and 1970s. Brett Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero, Tama Janowitz's Slaves of New York, and Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City (to cite three contemporary talents often linked together) marked a return to the morally charged bildungsroman featuring young people discovering themselves amidst the dangerous siren-song of the big city. Michael Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh depicted a young man finding out to his own dismay that he was bisexual, certainly a trendy concern in the Clinton era—but the tale is told with courtly wit and neo-classical dignity, not avant-garde prose or experimental narrative departures. Ron Hansen recreated the world of the American border outlaw with grace and fidelity in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Desperadoes—for what could be more conservative than nostalgia? Richard Russo, Russell Banks, Anne Tyler, Amy Hemphill, Ann Beattie, and Margaret Atwood are almost always realists in their strongest work. The worlds inside these fictions sought to mimic the actualities that the writer had experienced—they were in some sense creating guidebooks to life itself. Money, marriage, and morals—and especially memory—have made a decisive comeback.

In contrast, Millhauser's concern with the fantastic really evokes the experiments in American prose fiction that characterized the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, the era we associate with Coover, Barth, Stoppard, Gass, Borges, Gunter Grass, Tom Robbins, Donald Barthelme, and that perhaps climaxed (and exhausted itself?) with the publication of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow in 1973. Seen through our eyes now, those experiments seem as anachronistic as Eliot's “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Thus, Philip Roth wrote an entire novel about a man who, in the best Kafka-fairy-tale tradition, found himself turned into a breast. Steve Katz began a story with the line, “Wonder Woman was a dike, but she was nice.” The “roadside attraction” of Tom Robbins's first novel was the body of Jesus Christ, and in one of the eeriest departures of all, E. L. Doctorow took historical personalities like Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, and J. P. Morgan and allowed them to speak and think as intimately as if they were invented characters created solely for a novel. This is Millhauser's real artistic brotherhood: experimenters in the fabulous, meddlers in the genetic structure of narrative convention.

For example, his 1990 collection, The Barnum Museum, contains ten stories that are an attempt to make what we hold to be plausibilities yield up their forgotten core of strangeness. Even more startling, the inspiration for several of them is children's literature, fairy tales, or a “repellently cute” parlor game, and the reader should recall Jeffrey Cartwright's characterization of the American imagination as a “poor savage inarticulate giant” whose proper artistic celebration belongs to an artist who can properly deploy its amusements: “the false images that feed our American dreams—the technicolor and stardust … are in a manner purified, are used seriously in a serious work of art but without losing their gimcrack quality, so that every syllable (written in blood, gentlemen, in blood) seems to be taken as a joke only” (267). Intelligence and irony and a certain “gimcrack” quality with Millhauser are only a manner of presentation for what is at heart the account of a ride on a magic carpet.

Thus, for example, Millhauser's story “A Game of Clue” oscillates between a study of some literary young people who happen to be playing the board game and the characters and situations of the board game itself, with Miss Scarlet and Colonel Mustard and the others down there on the board endowed with appropriate feelings and psychology and even a microplot featuring murder. Another story, “Behind the Blue Curtain” has the narrator going to the movies with his father in an ordinary 1950s theater, then going somehow down behind the screen to a secret area where the film realm has become true—the same premise that Millhauser will exploit as the central tenet of his third novel, From the Realm of Morpheus. “The Barnum Museum,” like the very act of reading or viewing, contains “a bewildering and incalculable number of rooms” (73) and refreshes with its “dubious and enchanting” wonders, some of which smack of the “sly and gimcrack”—mermaids, watercolor paintings rendered on the air itself, magic lamps, and unicorns: “We may doubt the museum, but we do not doubt our need to return” (91). Despite the obviousness and coarseness of the wonders in the museum, it is necessary to us, although even then not quite sufficient to assuage that insatiable longing for something within the heart that Millhauser described in his essay on the miniature, and the story ends on his own unique note: “Welcome to the Barnum Museum! For us it's enough, for us it is almost enough” (91).

In perhaps the best tale in the collection, the great merchant Sinbad, now an old, old man marooned by time outside his great cycle of adventures, is the central figure in “The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad,” and the story also includes a fussy, pedantic, analytical voice (like Jeffrey Cartwright's in Edwin Mullhouse) that not only tells us the history of the Sinbad tales as merely literature but speculates on Sinbad as a personality as well—the divided personality that Millhauser always sets at the center of his fiction, the essential human personality vexed into fantasy by boredom but all too soon surfeited with fantasy and bored with that, too: “The restlessness of Sinbad, as he alternately seeks rupture and repose, is so much the secret rhythm of the story that it is difficult for us to believe in a contented Sinbad who settles down peacefully with paunch and pantoffles among his friends and concubines, a Sinbad who severs himself from the unknown, a Sinbad who does not set forth on an eighth voyage” (134).

In “Alice, Falling,” Lewis Carroll's Alice—one of the many literary inspirations and parodies that germinate Millhauser's work—oscillates between her imagined self falling into the black hole of eternal narrative space and an Alice who only lies dreaming with her head in her sister's lap in the frank English sunlight: looking at her sister's face as the girl stirs in her sleep, “Alice's sister thinks to herself: you are there and not there,” an apt caption for the human situation everywhere in Millhauser's created kingdoms. Just as with Nabokov, a story that seems at first merely a parody turns out to culminate in serious philosophic speculation—with Millhauser, literary parody is often the cradle of his inspiration.

Some critics have found this procedure precious, reductive, and limiting. For example, Joseph Kanon holds that one gets “the impression of Millhauser playing hide-and-seek with his own talent, trapped by cleverness and by irony that turns on itself endlessly” (Kanon 78). Sheldon Frank makes a similar point, claiming that Millhauser's “dazzling visual prose” is hagridden by “a coy and self-congratulatory cleverness and an almost spooky self-control” (Frank 28). Millhauser is dedicated to his vision—and no less grandiose term will do—and will no doubt continue to create fiction out of it. His is not a narrative of the linear, mimetic, naturalistic mode, but a stereoscopic fiction, and the reader must be prepared to question along with the author the solidity of the proscenium arch and the smug assumptions of a centuries-old covenant that had presumed to have settled once and for all the relationship between an artist's most urgent concerns and the reader or audience invited to observe those concerns—a reader or audience that in Millhauser's presence finds itself called upon to study the spectacle set before it through a confusing array of prisms and even read a part or two from the typescript unceremoniously thrust into his or her hands.

Mainstream fiction is supposed to be a mirror held up to reality. But Millhauser's fiction is not a mirror at all; rather it is an intricate miniature construction just the other side of a Carrollian looking-glass, and readers must prepare themselves for a journey of discovery that only begins with familiar narrative properties like character, plot, and setting. We soon discover we have crossed over into a looking-glass world that at first glance looks like our own but soon proves strange indeed—as strange as “reality” itself.

Works Cited

Frank, Sheldon. “Books in Brief: Portrait of a Romantic.” Saturday Review 5:1 (1 October 1977): 28.

Kanon, Joseph. “Satire and Sensibility.” Saturday Review 55:40 (30 September 1972): 73, 78.

Katz, Steve. “Mythology: Wonder Woman.” Innovative Fiction, edited by Jerome Klinkowitz. New York: Dell, 1972.

Millhauser, Steven. The Barnum Museum. New York: Poseidon, 1990.

———. Catalogue of the Exhibition: The Art of Edmund Moorash (1810-1846). Salmagundi (Fall 1991): 54-109.

———. Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright. New York: Knopf, 1972.

———. “The Fascination of the Miniature.” Harper's Magazine 268 (May 1984): 33-34. Reprinted from Grand Street (Summer 1983).

———. From the Realm of Morpheus. New York: Morrow, 1986.

———. In the Penny Arcade. New York: Pocket Books, 1987.

———. Portrait of a Romantic. New York: Pocket Books, 1977.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. New York: McGraw, 1970.

Updike, John. Memories of the Ford Administration. New York: Knopf, 1992