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\textit{Disruptions}, stories by Stephen Millhauser, Alfred A. Knopf,
hardcover, 270 pages, \$28.00 \\

At 81, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Millhauser is the elder
statesman of the short story. Most of the stories in this collection
were published between 2015 and 2021 and from the heartbreaking ending
of ``The Change'' to the compelling opening of ``The Little People,''
\textit{Disruptions} is a joy.

The first story, ``One Summer Night'' begins ``In the summer of my
sixteenth birthday, I fell in love with the night.'' The action
follows a young man with his first serious girlfriend, or as serious
as love can be for someone barely past the meridian of his teens, who
begins spending evenings at his girlfriend's house. They talk on the
couch and watch television, but their relationship is innocent and
exploratory. A relationship utterly changed one evening when our
narrator finds himself alone one evening with his girlfriend's mother.
The brief time he spends alone with her, alters him, alters his
relationship with both his girlfriend and her mother. They talk on the
sofa, push each other on the swing set, and climb onto the roof. The
stunning conclusion is not salacious or sexual, but inappropriate in
every way.

The narrator of ``The Fight'' is a bookish eighth grader, who after
witnessing an after-school altercation between two boys his own age,
begins to examine what his reaction in similar circumstances would be.
Few details are given about his life at home, and his family. His
mother teaches grade school, his father college, and he recalls
playing with toy soldiers at home, while his parents read. It is easy
for the reader to insert themselves into this character's existence,
to see their own struggle with change and expectation in the place of
the narrator. The otherness of the setting, which could be last year,
yet somehow feels like decades ago, becomes a fantasy world for
empathy.

``The Shadow Theater'' is a favorite of mine. It contains no
discernible characters and uses no dialogue, yet the story drives
forward from the opening sentence, creating a world of new imagination
as the unnamed town in the story is transformed by a new artistic
experience.

``When I look back to that first performance, I’m astonished to recall a
time before it all began. I was young, I was ambitious, my wife hummed
as she slipped into her bathing suit. Our children laughed in the sun.
We welcomed things, we and our friends, we seized whatever life had to
offer, while at the same time we never felt the need to step outside
certain unspoken bounds that struck us as natural and healthy.''

The performance is exactly as it sounds: shadows back-projected
against a white screen. Simple, even threadbare in its conception, yet
the art changes everyone who encounters it, upending the lives of an
entire town, altering the perspective of a generation. The story
invites allegory, though none is explicitly revealed.

And then Millhauser will deliver a haunted house story so original and
inevitable you wonder that it has not been done before. In ``The
Haunting'' Four best friends at the end of high school challenge one
of their own to stay the night in the Harrington House, a notorious
home with a dark history. When the first friend emerges at dawn
altered and unable or unwilling to speak about what happened, the
narrator spends a night at the haunted house himself. We see the
transformation from a different angle, a haunting without jump scares
or ghosts.

\textit{Disruptions} is a collection best read in multiple sittings.
Each of these stories on their own is remarkable, but read
sequentially, a sameness creeps in. I longed for characters if not
bright, then at least colorful. Yet I respect Millhauser's
understanding that we are members of communities as much we are
individuals. Whatever independence we imagine or crave for ourselves
can be undone with a single event, as in the story, ``After the
Beheading.''

``All I knew was that we were a peaceful town, with a guillotine on
the green.''


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