Let me make one thing perfectly clear: [Edwin Mullhouse] is a novel….

Let me add one more thing. Steven Millhauser, who is the only begetter of Cartwright, Mullhouse, Cartwright's biography, and Millhauser's novel, is a dazzlingly successful writer. He is also a precocious imitator of Vladimir Nabokov, as he graciously acknowledges by characterizing Cartwright as a biographer who lives next to his subject; who, more or less accidentally, becomes involved in his subject's death; who admires his subject but also competes with him and is neglected by him; and who begins the book with a reference to an "invisible amusement park"—all signs of his literary father, Kinbote in Nabokov's Pale Fire. In evoking the tangled intellectual and emotional bonds between author and biographer, Millhauser is very nearly Nabokov's equal. And that's not all.

Millhauser seriously rivals his master in pellucid and witty descriptions…. Like Nabokov, he is...