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CHAPTER 13 We Others: New and Selected Stories We Others: New and Selected Stories (2011) marks a milestone in Steven Millhauser’s career. Like Dangerous Laughter, this collection was published by Knopf, the publisher of Edwin Mullhouse, and long respected for the fiction the press publishes. Additionally the “New and Selected” organization of We Others acknowledges that Millhauser has been publishing fiction long enough to be more than due for a “Selected.” In his “Author’s Note,” Millhauser explains his initial effort to choose “representative” stories, but after deciding the stories he omitted were just as representative as those he chose, he abandoned that approach. He opted instead for stories that impressed him as though they were written by someone else. The first new story, “The Slap,” is written from a favorite Millhauser point of view—the first-person-plural—justified by a community, collectively attempting to make sense of a series of bizarre incidents. First Walter Lasher and eventually six others encounter a thirty-something man, who suddenly appears and without warning slaps each in the face so hard that the victim is too startled to respond before the slapper disappears. Eventually, after the slapper strikes several times, “we” focus on the term “victim,” generalizing that the slaps might not seem to justify the term: “Even so, it seemed to most of us that the suddenness of the attack, the strength of the slap, the apparent randomness , the anger and helplessness induced in the person receiving the slap” (We Others 14) justified the term. The story invests the most attention in Walter Lasher because his reaction is the most complicated. Readers can understand his being particularly startled not only because he is the first but also because he is tall and powerfully built. Lasher quickly recalls not having been assaulted since Jimmy Kubec shoved him in sixth grade and he then broke Jimmy’s nose. Lasher WE OTHERS 127 immediately tries to rationalize the episode: The slapper may have mistaken him for someone else; he may be deranged or a client of Lasher’s whose portfolio has suffered from the economic downturn. Perhaps Lasher unwittingly offended the slapper. Then he curiously persuades himself it is too late to call the police, but he will tell his wife. When he wakes in the night, Lasher immediately recalls breaking Jimmy’s nose, suggesting he may be feeling longdelayed guilt for his boyhood violence. Two mornings after waking from the nose-breaking dream, Lasher reads in the newspaper at breakfast that Robert Sutliff has been slapped. Again his response is curious: he feels relieved he had not been singled out, but no responsibility for Sutliff’s assault, even though his failure to report his slap made it possible for the slapper to strike again. Later he considers reporting it only because he thinks Sutliff was a poor observer. But Lasher has not told even his wife, making readers more curious why Lasher is so unsettled by the slap. That curiosity is fed by continuing attention to Walter Lasher, who practically snubs a female friend in the hardware store and becomes so secretive that his wife prefers he not come home from work. The extent of Lasher’s psychological injury from being slapped is measured by his misrecognizing Dr. Daniel Ettlinger as the slapper, who might be broadening his modus operandi by attempting a repeat slap. When Lasher slaps Ettlinger to forestall a second episode, both men are arrested. Lasher adds to the community’s angst by revealing that he never reported being the first victim. The community’s efforts to explain these slaps continue to be undercut. When Charles Kraus, who is returning from his work in the city, becomes the next victim, some speculate the slapper is targeting affluent commuters from their “bedroom community.” The slap of a cable repairman, Raymond Sorenson , undermines that “theory.” And then the slapping of the high-school student Sharon Hands broadens the victims by gender, just as the slapping of Valerie Kozlowski in her own home in the evening ratchets up the community ’s fear by another notch. The last victim is young newspaper reporter Matthew Dennis, tasked with riding the commuter train from Manhattan and taking note of the passengers’ comments. Matthew’s theory is that the slapper is reminding his victims of something they did and want to forget. True to form, the trench-coated slapper nails Matthew, immersed in speculation about the slapper’s motives. Matthew ’s article theorizing that the victims...

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