SOURCE: "Free Fall to Wonderland," in The New York Times Book Review, June 24, 1990, p. 16.

[Cantor is an author and a MacArthur Prize Fellow. Below, he reviews Millhauser's collection The Barnum Museum.]

"Imagination dead, imagine," Samuel Beckett moaned, dismayed to discover that even to write the demise of the imagination would be the imagination's work. Would this endless, pointless chase after imaginary rabbits never cease?

Whoa, you moody Irish brooder! Steven Millhauser, inhabitant of a sunnier, more American frame of mind, also takes the imagination as his subject [in The Barnum Museum], attempting, in this tightly focused collection of stories, to stage it, allegorize it, track its motives, delineate its solace, seek its limits. Unlike Beckett, though, Mr. Millhauser celebrates the times when, dissatisfied with life or our previous imaginings, we turn to … our imaginings.

In Mr. Millhauser's first story he imagines a game as the stage the imagination...