Darts and stars

Two of contemporary lit’s brightest take on love and romance

By John Freeman

The King in the Tree By Steven Millhauser; Knopf; $25; 242 pages.

The Darts of Cupid and Other Stories By Edith Templeton; Pantheon Books; $23; 320 pages.

If fate has dealt you a Valentine’s Day alone, have no fear. Before you drag out the tissues and a Meg Ryan movie, spin by your local bookstore, as two of America’s wiliest writers have just published superb collections about romance.

One of them spans several centuries and conjures characters toeing the knife’s edge of jealousy, while the other unfolds across the Atlantic in settings so sumptuous it will transport you to the Old World faster than a shot of vermouth.

Steven Millhauser’s The King in the Tree is by far the more sour of these two valentines. From the bitter widow who narrates “Revenge,” to the anxious court servant who narrates the book’s third and final novella, Millhauser’s cast knows well the art of betrayal. They cheat, deceive, and second-guess each other’s motives, all the while convinced they are being just and right.

The book’s first novella is a bravura piece of narration, told from the perspective of a retiring widow as she walks a potential buyer through her home. Gradually, this open house turns into a confessional, as each room dredges up painful memories. The smart of her husband’s early death doesn’t quite eclipse the bitterness of an affair in which he indulged. A stroll into the study calls to mind the man’s aloof nature.

In the hands of a lesser writer, this conceit might have yielded a gimmicky rant, but with Millhauser at the rudder it becomes a hand-wringing masterpiece. Sentence by sentence, Millhauser displays an awesome amount of control over his narrator’s voice, pitching her from cordial dismay to rage and back again with utter believability.

Millhauser’s ability to evoke the way paranoia ambushes us like this makes the second novella, “An Adventure of Don Juan,” a joy and a page-turner. The tale takes place in a far corner of England, where Don Juan has traveled to cure himself of his excessive womanizing. There he is hosted by an eccentric English gentleman whose daytime obsession is building a replica of Hades (as Ovid described it).

Within a few days of arriving, Don Juan falls madly in love with the man’s wife, only to find out that his prodigious charms are lost on her. The cure to the great Lothario’s obsession with women, it turns out, is a bit of his own medicine.

Finally, in the last piece, Millhauser reimagines the ancient story of Tristan and Isolde, recasting the King as a cuckold driven mad by jealousy. The story unfolds through diary entries of Thomas of Cornwall, a counselor to the King who gets caught in the middle of some double-crossing.

Again, Millhauser’s ability to control the pitch and tone of his narrator’s voice allows this story to soar where other writers might have failed. Thomas’s diary entries have the right blend of urgency and self-consciousness to render this tale as guiltily addictive as an afternoon soap opera.

Of all Millhauser’s characters, Thomas is the most likeable because he truly does agonize over his duty. On the one hand, he wants to preserve peace in the kingdom, so he helps facilitate some of the Queen’s dalliances with Tristan.

But at the same time, Thomas does not want to betray his King, a man who in one moment wants to cast a blind eye, but in the other swoops home early from hunting expeditions to catch the lovers in flagrante delicto.

Here is the tension which makes these novellas so hard to put down, so true to the nature of romance. The greater the love, Millhauser suggests, the more it falls prey to greed, watchfulness, and corruption. In the end, these novellas reveal that the heart always knows what it wagers.

Deceit also runs throughout Edith Templeton’s collection, Darts of Cupid, but it’s of a more refined vintage. Set in the high-ceilinged drawing rooms and rain-slicked streets of the author’s native Prague, these stories conjure a world where lying is not just a sport, but a necessary social skill. Edith, the narrator of “The Dress Rehearsal,” explains the rules of the game.

“In drawing rooms, one had to laugh often, even when nothing witty was being said. One behaved obliquely, as though standing a few paces apart from oneself, observing oneself speak and the impressions one made on others.”

Several of the stories are told from Edith’s perspective; she’s a sharp-tongued young lady just making her debut, so to speak. Her innocence, however skeptical, allows Templeton to present each scene with the cool, almost anthropological gaze of a newcomer. In “Irresistibly,” Edith learns why a pretentious, yet dashing, painter always finds himself on the edge of parties, while “Equality Cake” shows how the display of money can be quite helpful when one needs to attract interesting suitors.

As the characters of this book age, the focus shifts from money to matters of the heart. Or maybe loins. The title piece caused quite an uproar in some circles with its initial publication in The New Yorker because of a few racy scenes — and Templeton’s first novel (being re-released by Pantheon next month) was banned in places for similar reasons. “Darts” takes place during World War II in an army office, where a young woman in the process of divorcing her husband, falls for a married Army major. Like many men in the service at the time, the major’s idea of fidelity to his wife is summed up by the following:

“It boiled down to the joke of the wife in America writing to her husband-soldier overseas, ‘I hear you got yourself a mistress. What has she got that I haven’t got?’ and his replying, ‘Nothing except she’s got it right here.’ ”

It’s quite gauche to lose one’s cool over something as petty as romance in this society. For, as in any Bogart film, happiness, or the semblance thereof, is just a cocktail and a cigarette away. After all, no one cries when they smoke.

But, with subversive tenacity, Templeton’s stories always circle back to matters of the heart, showing how much mystery lurks beneath the manners. Although many of them refuse to speak it, women do get their hearts broken here, and badly so.

In the final piece, “Nymph & Faun,” all this heartache coalesces with the tale of a widow living on the coast in Italy, going through the belongings of her late husband. A pair of candlesticks emerges from the wreck of his life. Templeton’s description of the object is a magnificent summary to this steely author’s views on the awesomeness and the banality of love.

“As we know, nymphs and fauns are not to be held in awe. They are minor rural deities, given to frolicking among wooded grounds. As painted and sculpted through the ages, the faun leers and the nymph looks frightened. The faun is forever the chaser and the nymph the victim, and though the outcome of their encounter is certain, their amorous situation feels both transitory and nasty.”

Sounds a bit like lovers, indeed.

John Freeman can be reached at jfreeman4@nyc.rr.com.