An enchanting, moonlit fable from Steven Millhauser

By Andrew B. Roth, Associated Press writer

In his beautifully written novella "Enchanted Night" (Crown, $17), Steven Millhauser revisits his motif of a moonlit summer night.

In this fable, the moon serves as agent and spotlight for the events in a southern Connecticut suburb. So prevalent is Millhauser's repetition of imagery, so insistent on the dark blue night sky and ever-present moon, that the story is itself suffused with sky and moonlight.

Characters are introduced in evocative vignettes: Laura, the restless adolescent; Haverstraw, the failed writer; Janet, the heartsick lover; a band of hoodlum girls; forgotten toys that come to life in an attic; a mannequin longing for release from her pose; and others, longing in the night, drawn outside by the moon's pull. These glances evolve into narratives that sometimes cross paths.

The novella opens with a passage reminiscent of Millhauser's short story "Clair de Lune," where the moon draws a teen boy to an encounter with some female schoolmates playing baseball at night. Underlying that story is the magic and confusion of emerging sexuality.

In the opening snapshot, titled "Restless," Laura, 14, suffers the impatience, anxiety and self-consciousness typical for her age. "She doesn't want anyone to look at her. No one is allowed to think about her body." Millhauser skillfully describes adolescence, the strangeness of changing bodies. Laura thinks: "The inside of her skin itches. Her bones itch. ... She has to get out of there. ..."

The story leaves Laura and goes on to other characters, one by one, making the rounds; characters are introduced and then whisked away, and returned to later.

"The Man in the Attic," Haverstraw, struggles with the specter of failure, both in his art and life. Wandering in the moonlight, he implores, "Comfort me, night. Soothe me, old moon." Later, cutting through the woods, Haverstraw stumbles upon a nude, moonbathing Laura, thus disrupting "The Man With Shiny Black Hair," a pervert who collects prurient mental pictures of young girls. Laura leaves behind a roll of Life Savers as tribute, renewing Haverstraw's resolve.

Millhauser alludes to the symbolic feminine power of the moon, most directly through a gang of high school girls who break into houses and take food and other small items. The girls, mysterious, uncontrollable forces, prey on the anxiety of the community, its inability to breach their sisterhood, by leaving brazen written acknowledgments -- "We Are Your Daughters" -- in the houses they invade.

Millhauser makes penetrating observations in a section called "The Beach on a Summer Night." He writes about the nighttime beach in "the hour of lovers and loners" in a novella dominated by lovers and loners:

Janet, an expectant lover whose fantasy is realized when "the charmer, the heartbreaker" arrives in her back yard and the two make love; Cooper, an ordinary fellow out on a drunken ramble, who finds himself walking hand in hand with the epitome of grace, a store mannequin; the mannequin, who longs for movement and flesh; and Pierrot, a toy doll brought to life by the moonlight and whose advances are always rebuked by his doll love, Columbine.