Millhauser's first novel received wide critical attention and excellent reviews but few readers. (Although those readers tend to grapple him to their soul with hoops of steel.) If these facts mean anything, they probably mean not that Millhauser is a coterie writer but that he is less confusable with other writers…. We tend not to like new things; for this reason our first question about a novelty is likely to be "what's it like?" If it is like nothing we know, we shy away. In art this happens all the time. When we say that a first-rate writer must create his own audience, we mean little more than that he must bring out latent tastes in his audience since he has chosen not to appeal to those already developed. In Edwin Mullhouse and now in Portrait of a Romantic Millhauser deals with topics that Anglo-American life and art have worn down into clichés over the last two centuries: the child, growing up, school days, nature and nurture, the fall from innocence, sex, all that jazz. (p. 251)
But Millhauser has managed to put things differently; no wonder people backed off nervously. Although one reads Edwin Mullhouse with recurrent pops of amused recognition—that's it exactly! that's the way it was! I'd forgotten!—one also reads with a steadily deepening realization that Millhauser has much more on his mind than childhood games and games with childhood, and that his 13-year-old narrator Jeffrey has considerably more on his mind, and his conscience, than an affectionate biography of his late neighbor, good buddy, and budding writer Edwin. There are deep waters and dark passages, and curious discoveries about art, readers and human relationships. Like a movie about children from which children are banned by the movies' censorship code, Edwin Mullhouse is hardly a children's book, though definitely a book for former children.
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