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

In the following essay, Fowler praises Millhauser as a miniaturist, claiming that this role sets the author apart from other contemporary writers and allows him to create “exquisite, apolitical, socially indifferent” tales.

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...