SOURCE: "The Surreal as Substance," in The Los Angeles Times, September 30, 1990, p. 11.

[Below, Saroyan gives a mixed review of the stories in The Barnum Museum.]

In more than a few of the 10 stories that comprise The Barnum Museum it's as if a prodigious, bizarre and photographic imagination is struggling mightily to pin itself to the mat of the post-modern story as practiced, for example, by the late Donald Barthelme. Steven Millhauser does his best to distance his art, to make it cool in the manner of accomplished predecessors, but the effect is sometimes like seeing a gorgeous butterfly—say a tiger-swallow-tail—mounted under glass, and then catching a slight twitch in one of its wings.

He can be witty. "Klassik Komix #1" is a comic-book version—the prose divided into sections labeled "Cover" and "Panels" numbered 1 through 44—of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, in which the anti-hero...