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 details and maintains the same disturbing distance and detachment.

Millhauser is blessed with spectacular descriptive gifts. He can capture in a sentence or two the smell of a summer day or the feel of a dusty old volume. Yet he also overwrites with a vengeance. If he writes something well once, he will write it twice, or three times, or maybe four; never is a noun permitted to wander unaccompanied by an adjective or a flood of adjectives. Both of his novels are stretched out beyond necessity, bloated with Millhauserian prose.

Portrait of a Romantic is a sad, witty, accurate chronicle of growing up strange and dreamy, but far too often it reads like the work of a man who spent so much of his youth in a library that his knowledge could not be brought to life by experience. Steven Millhauser has an enviable talent, but up to now he has only created two extremely impressive sarcophagi.