Portrait of a Romantic is about 30,000 words too long, and most of them are adjectives; massed battalions of them, lovingly marshalled in pages of relentlessly detailed description for what is, at a second glance, a disarmingly slight tale.

The romantic in question is the prosaically named Arthur Grumm and the novel concerns itself with the first year or so of his adolescence and his relationships with three friends in an anonymous American suburb some time—I would guess—in the 1950s. The friends slot themselves easily into prototypical roles…. Such narrative drive as there is laboriously works its way around to dangerous games of Russian roulette with a loaded pistol that finally put paid to the pragmatic William who has, by the end of the novel, fatally caught the romantic malaise that so virulently infects the others.

This romanticism is of the most lush and hackneyed sort. Millhauser...