Edwin Mullhouse was a Connecticut boy who wrote the novel Cartoons and who died under strange circumstances at age 11; Jeffrey Cartwright, his neighbor, classmate and friend, wrote this biography a year later. That's Steven Millhauser's donnee, as Henry James would say; that's what we readers must accept [in Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer (1943–1954) by Jeffrey Cartwright] with a willing suspension of our disbelief. Believe it or not, it's well worth accepting. This is no "Peanuts"; Jeffrey is no oleaginous and self-pitying Charlie Brown; the novel has no Christian Message. Jeffrey is a Nabokovian child: witty, literate, perceptive and disturbingly complex. Edwin is different, an artist of the Beckettian sort. Their acquaintances, their schooldays, their relationship—all is grist for Jeffrey's mill and for Millhauser's beautifully shaped and polished description of the pleasures, sorrows and evils of childhood, of art and of life. Don't be put off by the apparent whimsy of the title and the youth of the characters; this is a mature, skillful, intelligent and often very funny novel—and the author's first. (p. 30)
[Childhood] is a life in itself, of course, with rather more variety to it than grownup life offers, and it is experienced with much more intensity than we jaded adults can generally manage. Millhauser's narrator conveys it marvelously, and he does equally well with the intricacies of that other Nabokovian theme, the relationship of the reader-critic to his author. On these topics and many others, the novel offers a steady stream of profits and pleasures…. (p. 31)
"A Few Novels: 'Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer (1943–1954) by Jeffrey Cartwright'," in The New Republic (reprinted by permission of The New Republic; © 1972 The New Republic, Inc.), Vol. 167, No. 10, September 16, 1972, pp. 30-1.
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