Stephen Millhauser's best story

Friend WS has been recommending Steven Millhauser stories to me for some time, and I've felt overall that his stories tend to be a little mannered and "academic" - that is, not quite experimental but stories written to showcase the writer's talent and imagination rather than to reflect on or examine or re-create aspects of our known world, stories that earn tenure and prizes but not readership - nothing wrong with that but a matter of taste in what we read. Nevertheless, WS and I often agree on writers - in short stories, we both greatly admire Carver, for example - so I keep meaning to look further into Millhauser's work, and then - pleased to see a story by him in most recent (to me, mail is slow around here) issue of the New Yorker, A Voice in the Night, read it, and you know what - it's an absolutely terrific story, the best by him I've ever read and one of the best American stories I've read in some time. It does have his imaginative reach and stylistic flourishes, his signatures, but in this case he devotes those skills and talents to telling a beautiful and complicated - on the surface, at heart it's actually quote simple - story about a life, about his life. Story is actually three narrative threads running along simultaneously: Millhauser's re-telling of a Biblical story, when the very young Samuel hear the calling - a voice in the night - of the Lord and pledges to serve the Lord; of the writer, Millhauser himself, as a 7-year-old, first hears of the Biblical story and waits in the night for some kind of calling, which he anticipates and fears, and of the current 68ish Millhauser, insomniac, up in the night hearing noises: Millhauser uses this tripartite story to reflect on Judaism, the conflicts the young boy feels assimilating in a suburban Connecticut community, his complex of feelings about his father, a professor, devoted to his non-lucrative work, about the clannishness and difference of his people and his faither; and in then, perhaps most moving and powerful, about the older man, wondering about pledging himself to service of the Lord, known he did not do that, he couldn't even practice a religion, but that he has devoted himself, his entire life, to his art - a beautiful sentiment, and this story, on top of Millhauser's many awards and recognitions, shows that he has served his "god" well and truly. A Voice in the Night captures in just a few pages some of the mood and culture that Roth (and to a lesser extent Bellow) have devoted hundreds of pages to expounding - Roth's work is monumental, but there's something also very striking and satisfying about the economy of a story. As Strunk and White put it: a sentence should have no unnecessary words, just as a machine should have no unnecessary parts; Millhauser's story, though by no means minimal(ist), is a great example of economy in telling.