Like great actors in mediocre plays, there are some writers whose talent seems larger than the vehicles they have chosen to contain it. A case in point is [Edwin Mullhouse], a remarkably well-written and sometimes funny account of the hitherto unrecognized genius Edwin Mullhouse…. [The] narrative takes us from Edwin's first gurgles to his creative Later Years and, as such, is a devilish satire on those exhaustive biographies that weigh down shelves with their bulky worthiness and unrelieved tedium. The tone is sly and articulate, as if written by one of Salinger's Glass children, and though the initial idea is admittedly small and even fey, Millhauser makes the most (if not too much) of it, detailing for us the most ordinary of childhoods through Jeffrey's pompous New Crit perspective. (The two boys react to each other like a sinister Holmes and Watson—Edwin makes fun of Jeffrey, whom he rightly sees as a drip, and Jeffrey's underlying resentment and disapproval occasionally come to the narrative surface with quiet hilarity.) (pp. 73, 78)
This kind of elaborate literary conceit, of course, is beloved by academics because it presupposes not only a familiarity with existing literature but a conscious limiting of scope to emphasize verbal dexterity (something Nabokov used to more comic effect in Pale Fire). Millhauser takes some sideswipes at this approach and has some fun dropping pseudopedantic clues. But given his own material, it is all pretty much a case of biting the hand that feeds. The danger in this kind of cerebral writing is an absence of emotion, and Millhauser, alas, runs the familiar gamut from A to B. Certainly he can't be faulted for his fluency and sense of prose style—he can write like a streak—but even the dazzling eventually wearies. Such a lot of cleverness! Detail after detail, send-up after send-up, are piled one on top of another, rococo style, until the structure becomes top-heavy and collapses—a 300-page game. What begins as a satire on exhaustive biographies becomes, itself, an exhausting satire.
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