Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright

Edwin Mullhouse, published in 1972, is a the supposed biography of Edwin Mullhouse, the author of the brilliant novel Cartoons, written when he was eleven years old. The author of this biography is Jeffrey Cartwright, a lifetime friend of Edwin’s. While a handful of excerpts of Cartoons are included, this “biography” in three sections focuses on the arc of Edwin’s daily childhood activities up to the point of his untimely death. What soon becomes evident is rather than being a “boy genius,” Edwin is as normal as they come, gifted with intelligence but no wunderkind.

For the reader of a certain age, what makes this novel so interesting is the author’s ability to capture childhood perceptions of life in the late 1940s and show more early 1950s, evoking with numerous examples the games, books, and activities popular at the time. He also presents the fear invoked by bullies on the school playground, the power of friendship on life’s direction, along with the passion of childhood romances that mimic what waits ahead in adolescence and adulthood. With humor and dark insight, the travails and joys of childhood are articulated in the biographer’s focus on a single individual.

This book has a dark undercurrent, which only becomes evident in its later chapters. While the twist presented at the end disturbs, it does not detract from the readers being able to fully identify with Edwin’s childhood. He is a character most readers will recognize from their own lives. Steven Millhauser later went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for his novel, Martin Dressler. While this work is not as well known, his gifts as an author are on full display here. The innocence of childhood is shown to be a journey layered with landmines primed to explode. Unusual as it plot is, it proves captivating. show less

Beautiful at both the sentence level and the book level. Also sad, funny, surreal at times, and a brilliant concept: a 11 (or 12 or 13?) year old boy writes a literary biography of his 11 year old (deceased) friend. The biographer child is still very much a child but with the writing capabilities of, well, Steven Millhauser. I felt like it captured the feeling of my childhood (and some of the specifics too - like mercurochrome bottles), even though this book takes place in the 1940s and 1950s and I grew up in the 1970s and 80s. Part of me wants to ask - why is everyone not reading this? But perhaps, like most books, it isn't for everyone. It isn't, for instance, a page turner, or a thriller, or romantasy. But gosh it reminded me why I show more love reading, and I had a hard time finishing it because I didn't want it to end. show less

Millhauser’s uncanny evocation of childhood at a particular late American moment is a harrowing whirl of inscrutable mood swings, toys, teasing, scribbles, scoldings, licorice, violence, and wandering walks home. The surface conceit—that this is a biography of a boy, written by another boy—evaporates quickly; no mere child (and few grownups) can write prose so taut and shrewd. The world of children is revealed as the one and only world, the world of imagination and enchantment, desire and disappointment, life and death. Millhauser grants Jeffrey some trenchant musings on the art of words and the writer’s tumultuous psyche, and when in the last few pages Edwin tells Jeffrey that "I aspire to the condition of fiction,” we know show more he means both transfiguration and ascension. show less

Millhauser really cracks me up. If you've read a fair number of biographies and are amused by impossibly precocious kids, he'll crack you up too. If, however, children annoy you and you're unaware of biographical cliches then, sadly, you will probably be less than amused.

I think Alicia Aho recommended this book to me. Bless her.

Edwin Mullhouse is a strange and remarkable book: it circles in upon itself until the entire edifice collapses and the scales drop from your eyes.

This is a fictional biography of a "boy genius" written by his (fictional) best friend, yet Millhauser makes no attempt to write like a 12-year-old. Jeffrey, the biographer, is not exactly an unreliable narrator, but he is certainly a self-deceiving one. Edwin, the boy novelist, would have spun a different tale if he had written his own autobiography.

Millhauser manages to parody the genre of literary biography while the strangely adult Jeffrey carefully details Edwin's infancy and childhood. "Details" is the operative word. Many pages are devoted to recalling the most mundane objects, sounds, show more smells, and activities of childhood, managing to evoke those same memories and sensations in the reader. Millhauser's prose is simple yet exactly right.

Most of the adults in Edwin Mullhouse are cardboard figures. Jeffrey seems to lack a life outside of Edwin. Elementary school is a hothouse worthy of a soap opera, full of passion and violence, barely recognized by the adults who are supposed to be running things.

Despite being twelve, Jeffrey wrestles with "big" questions--at one point Jeffrey says the artist creates the art, but the biographer creates the artist--that are of course the actual author's own ruminations.

I have no idea why this book didn't become an "instant classic" (has anyone else noticed how that term parallels "jumbo shrimp"?). It is really that good. The reason I gave it four and a half stars is simply because it took a long time for me to read it. Perhaps on my second reading it will go faster. show less

Ostensibly the biography of one 11-year-old boy by another, Edwin Mullhouse is a dark and funny take on childhood, but it is not really a book “about” a story and characters. It is essentially a book about the art of the writer, and is a commentary on itself. Millhauser’s achievement is to simultaneously imagine, justify, and undermine the idea of biography as a creative performance, then crack it all open with an unexpected, revelatory finish.

Left Hand 400-pound Monkey IPA
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I started reading Millhauser with Dangerous Laughter. I loved it, and progressed to Martin Dressler, which I also enjoyed, but from then on thought that Steven Millhauser was best at writing short stories and novellas as opposed to full length novels. So I read Millhauser occasionally, whenever a new collection came out (We Others, then Voices in the Night) or whenever I found one of his books in the used bookstore. And on a whim one Friday I decided to read Edwin Mullhouse, which I had bought at the end of college out of obligation to my devotion to owning all of his works, but never read as the summary didn't interest me at the time.

Now, though, I paid more attention to it, and suffice to say Edwin Mullhouse blew me away. I pored show more over every page. Highly recommended, and my favorite work by Millhauser. show less