SOURCE: Evenson, Brian. Review of Enchanted Night, by Steven Millhauser. Review of Contemporary Fiction 20, no. 2 (summer 2000): 180-81.

In the following review, Evenson offers a mixed assessment of Enchanted Night.

Millhauser's latest offering [Enchanted Night] is a lean novella consisting of seventy-four short, titled prose sections. Through these Millhauser chronicles a moonlit summer night in Connecticut. He alternates between several different story lines: a mannequin coming to life, a drunken and lonely man stumbling home, a girl waiting for a lover that may or may not exist, a failed author and his abortive relations with a childhood friend's mother, toys coming to life, a band of teenage girls who break into houses and leave cryptic notes, and so on. Punctuating these stories are choruses of night voices, the sounds of insects, and a piper calling the children from their beds.

Though some of the sections are decidedly not Millhauser...