Enchanted Night: A Novella


Enchanted Night: A Novella is a novella by Steven Millhauser first published in 1999 by Crown Publishers.

Contents

The novella is presented in seventy-four titled vignettes.

Plot

The novella is told from a third-person omniscient point-of-view by a reliable narrator.
The story unfolds in a single summer night from around midnight until dawn. The setting is a small American town similar to that which the author grew up, namely Connecticut in the 1950s. The scenes are illuminated by a full moon. The characters include local townspeople as well as non-human figures such as animated mannequins and dolls. The mythical moon-goddess Diana presides over this shadowy domain.

Reception

Reviewer Isobel Montgomery at The Guardian laments that Millhauser fails to develop his material, such that the effects of the moon on the novella's characters are more "enervating" than enchanting. Montgomery rates the novella as little more than "an exercise in creative writing" by the Pulitzer Prize winning author.
New York Times reviewer Tobin Harshaw detects a shift away from Millhauser's "menacing" and "unsettling" works in conceiving "Enchanted Night," but which "Millhauser also seems handcuffed by the languor." Harshaw reports that this "curious novella" may be a harbinger of what Millhauser "may capable of delivering if he paid as much attention to moments of reality as he does to the realm of illusion."

Theme

Millhauser provides no precise time and setting for the novella but it likely occurs in "the small-town America of the author's childhood in southern Connecticut...there are some clues that the year might be sometime in the 1950s." The narrative occurs "between midnight and dawn" on a summer night. If there is a chief protagonist in Enchanted Night, it is the moon personified by the goddess Diana, who lures all things into her domain, and "where she both exposes and protects vulnerable human beings."
The "characters" are both conventional figures, all of whom are human, as well as "non-human figures": "a store-window mannequin, the dolls in the attic that awake at night...stock figures such as figures from the Italian Del arte productions, creatures from ancient Greek and Roman mythology, and above all, the "moon-goddess" Diana."
Supporting the novella's "celebration of a moonlit night" is its musical lyricism. Millhauser himself reports that "the conception of the work was musical—a theme and variation on a summer night." Biographer Earl G. Ingersoll writes:
Steven Millhauser comments on the thematic elements of the novella in a 2001 interview with critic Marc Chénetier: