There is something very disconcerting and peculiar about Steven Millhauser's fiction. It is written with the discipline of a man far beyond his thirty-four years. Millhauser is a novelist of decided yet disquieting talent, a prisoner of his own acute intelligence and self-consciousness. A young man who knows too much, Millhauser has to learn to relax when he writes….

[Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943–1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright] was a debut of striking inventiveness written in dazzling visual prose, yet marred by a coy and self-congratulatory cleverness and an almost spooky self-control. His new novel, Portrait of a Romantic, picks up where Mullhouse left off and traces the adolescence of the romantic Arthur Grumm—an adolescence dense with elaborate daydreams and night dreams that fill pages of the book. As he did in his first novel, Millhauser pays acute attention to physical and psychological...