Matt B. (BuffaloSavage) reviewed Edwin Mullhouse : The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright (Vintage Contemporaries) on + 53 more book reviews
This 1972 novel is an example of post-modern writing that perpetrates the traditional literary fraud of fiction impersonating fact. The narrator, Jeffrey Cartwright, takes it upon himself to write the biography of Edwin Mullhouse, a precocious genius who wrote the Great American Novel at the age of ten. Millhauser uses Jeffrey to convey the fleeting impressions, turbulent emotions, dramas and interludes, fears, confusions, jealousies, bungles and shocks that constitute the daily life of a child. The novel is a satire of literary biography as it theorizes that only obsession explains a biographer's voraciousness for facts for writing a doorstop biography. It is a classic of passion and fixation, joining modern classics such as Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, Lolita, The Collector, and Possession. Readers, especially those born in the Fifties, won't go wrong with this one if they are looking for a serious, disquieting novel that explores an American childhood and the awful power of obsession.
