SOURCE: "A Collection of Cunning Escape Routes for Fleeing the Mundane," in The Chicago Tribune, August 5, 1990, p. 7.

[In the following review, Balz favorably assesses The Barnum Museum.]

Among the pleasures of literature, and there are many, is one that is absent from much of the self-conscious fiction of recent years. It is what made readers of most of us when we were too young to know better, but that doesn't make it just a childish delight. It may, in fact, be the root of the storytelling impulse; the desire to escape a humdrum world of ordinary appearances for one where anything and everything is possible.

Steven Millhauser's new book, The Barnum Museum, pays homage to this type of writing in the most direct way possible, by recreating those delicious sensations in his readers. But Millhauser is hardly an archaeologist of fiction. His short stories are old-fashioned and avant...