Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Steven Millhauser (in 1996 for Martin Dressler) is a skillful writer; it seems as if he is capable of picking just the right word every time, putting them in sequences that mesmerize and fascinate. The worlds he creates are fantastic realms of magic carpets, amusement parks almost beyond our imagination, and department stores of dizzying complexity. The world he doesn't create is a world reflective of the one we live in, that world that has served the great writers so well. And although it is probably unfair to ask him to do something he does not intend to do, his fiction raises some serious fin-de-siècle questions. He has an utterly fascinated following of reputable critics who to date have found nothing to say about the disparity between his fantastic fictions and our mundane lives. In “The New Automaton Theatre” he writes that it represents “the timeless perfection of an art that lifts us above the cares of mortality and gives meaning to our lives.”

In an attempt to “lift us above the cares of mortality,” Millhauser has created the twelve stories in the collection under review. The title story, “The Knife Thrower,” begins as many do in a first-person-plural narration: “When we learned that Hensch, the knife thrower, was stopping at our town for a single performance at eight o'clock on Saturday night, we hesitated, wondering what we felt.” By the time the performance is over, Hensch has wounded two young women, and possibly killed a third. Neither his intention nor the author's is very clear. At least in “The Lottery” Shirley Jackson's bizarre story says something recognizable about human nature. That almost never seems to be Millhauser's aim. It gets worse. In the next story, “A Visit,” the narrator travels to upstate New York to visit an old college friend married to a two-foot-tall frog. Just that, nothing more. In “Flying Carpets” the neighborhood children fly around on carpets as common and numerous as bikes. Soon bored, the boys cast their carpets into the basement.

The most complicated stories almost defy analysis. In “The New Automaton Theatre,” automatons of dazzling complexity perform, first as almost perfect replicas of humans (some in the audience fall in love with the five- or six-inch automatons); later the automatons are a gross distortion of the humans they represent. The reader works through this brilliantly written story of two dozen pages hoping, perhaps even praying, for the line, the paragraph, the page where it will begin to make sense. Disappointed, one moves on to “The Dream of the Consortium,” a monumental story in every sense, where one can buy in the ultimate department store from enormously long lists anything under the sun. Among the possibilities: “a meticulous replicating of four galleries chosen from the Prado, the Uffizi, the Rijksmuseum, and the Hermitage, with expert reproductions of all the paintings, frames, and statues.” If that doesn't satisfy you, perhaps “the Baths of Caracalla and Hadrian's Villa” delivered to your “ten-acre business park” will. The lists of merchandise are ingenious but numbing, as are Millhauser's lists in several other stories. But no enumeration of all the possibilities that can be fabricated is equal to the layer upon layer—above ground and underground—of amusement park rides, shows, et cetera that “Paradise Park” contains. It is a park where delights and depravities finally represent “an absence of limits.”

Is the critics' praise of Millhauser's fiction reminiscent of “The Emperor's New Clothes,”...