Little could James Joyce have foreseen the avalanche of cliché he was setting in motion when he began A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with [a] now legendary sentence…. In thousands of first novels since Joyce's revolutionary use of the baby artist's earliest lisping literacies half a century ago, a precocious horde of sensitive, rebellious, grimly ambitious children—every last one of them wise and gifted beyond his tender years—have marched to the same leitmotif: The child is father of the novelist, and the proper study of a young writer is Himself when young.

It has been left to the ingenious imagination of still another first novelist, a Brown University graduate student named Steven Millhauser, to stand the Künstlerroman genre on its swollen head in Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943–1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright…. Not in the least by chance, he has also produced a brilliant parody of Literary Biography (Semi-Worshipful)…. Compared to Jeffrey's zealous sense of purpose, his industrious concentration on his subject's infinite variety and plenitude of sameness, James Boswell seems inattentive, Richard Ellmann's Joyce slipshod, Leon Edel's James cursory. (p. 15)

If the Graduate Student's Revenge were all that Steven Millhauser had in mind for his cunningly literate mockery, Edwin Mullhouse would still be an extraordinary achievement. But he is aiming at much more than parody. At the heart of the book, all kidding aside, is a metaphor of childhood as a state of genius.

Except for the tormented year that Edwin sweated over the writing of Cartoons, there was nothing in the least Mozartian about the boy novelist…. When Jeffrey's literary horizons were expanding into Dickens and Mark Twain, Edwin was still engrossed in Walt Disney's Comics & Stories and his kid sister's first-grade texts….

What sets Edwin apart, the essence of his singularity, is his stubborn refusal to surrender the transient genius bestowed upon children, "the capacity to be obsessed," whether the obsession is with Bugs Bunny or Pick Up Sticks…. Edwin successfully defied life's cruel assault on a child's playful freedom, "the obscenity of maturity"—and if Jeffrey cannot resist patting himself on the back for this "memorable phrase," the little monster should be forgiven. A biographer's lot is not a happy one.

Even more than a remarkable tour de force of parody, equal in its way to the best of [Max] Beerbohm, Edwin Mullhouse is a portrait not so much of the artist as a young child as of the ordinary child as artist. At the age of 29, Millhauser seems to have forgotten nothing of the way children go about the business of being children, at once succored by the adult world and stymied by its elephantine misreading of what children need and want. With all its satiric exaggeration and absurdity, Edwin Mullhouse is the most comprehensive account I've read of the language and lore of American middle-class children.

Of course the idea of childhood as a state of grace—in the psychological, not religious, sense—is a sacred liberal shibboleth of our time. From Paul Goodman's Growing up Absurd, through the radical educational theorists like John Holt, Ivan Illich, Edgar Friedenberg, et al., we have been told that children possess a spontaneous creativity, a capacity for freedom of feeling and thought, that adult society inexorably stifles or deflects through such repressive institutions as school. It is the old Rousseauian idea of the natural child doomed by the harness of unnatural necessity. And Jeffrey Cartwright, that child of his time, knows all about the "obscenity of maturity." But Steven Millhauser knows something more—that the end of childhood is not necessarily a form of death, just as the violence of Mickey Mouse or Tom and Jerry cartoons doesn't really hurt. And parody is a higher form of comedy than slapstick. (p. 16)