Steven Millhauser Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Richard Eder

Critical Essay by Richard Eder

SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “This ‘Penny’ Shortchanges the Reader.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (8 January 1986): 6.

In the following essay, Eder asserts that the stories of In the Penny Arcade “all suffer to varying degrees from overarrangement and an evident striving for effect.”

[In In The Penny Arcade] Steven Millhauser's seven short stories are so carefully made that they seem overdressed. They sit stiffly on the page as if wary of wrinkling their velvet.

Several of them are written with a lush realism, shot through with weather, colors and states of feeling. Others are elaborate inventions with touches of fable or legend or magic. One is a triumph. None is without intelligence, and some possess quite a lot. But they all suffer to varying degrees from overarrangement and an evident striving for effect.

In the three realistic stories, Millhauser avoids entirely the chill and distance that pervade the work...
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