Lucky 13: Millhauser's unusual and powerful story in current New Yorker

Was skeptical at first about Stephen Millhauser's story in current New Yorker, 13 Wives, expected, feared, some misogynistic male fantasy souped up literary version of Big Love, and first few paragraphs confirmed those trepidations, as narrator explains how he's so content and comfortable living in his great Queen Anne house with his 13 wives - OK, and how do they feel about this convenient, for him, arrangement?- and then he proceeds to describe each of the 13 in sequence - and the first is his total helpmate and spiritual match, if he bumps his shin she gets a bruise, and I thought Oh, spare me, but gradually, amazingly, this story drew me in - it begins to get pretty funny especially by wife # four who's a complete kvetch and continues to complain to him about everything - why don't I have a dehumidifier? - even as they're having sex = and by this point in the story I'm thinking, all right, these are multiple visions of the same wife, just as all of us have multiples visions of one another, especially of those we're closest to, but that would be pretty simplistic and Millhauser is anything but that, as the story moves on to stranger and more mysterious elements - a wife who floats, e.g. - and by the end we begin - just barely begin - to understand that the story is about a grander theme, it has something to do with how our observations and fantasies work to build our complete and complex understanding of other people and how in a sense our life is made up of the stories we construct for ourselves about our interactions with others - the last two "wives" are especially powerful moments in this story, the 12th a wife who is composed of the events that did not happen (as all of us wonder, how would my life have been different if this one event had not happened? and the 13th composed of the thousands of women he has seen for a passing moment and thought about even for a second as someone he could, who knows?, know and love, maybe, in another world or life or in a story.