["Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer (1943–1954). By Jeffrey Cartwright"], Steven Millhauser's deft first novel,… offers a substantial amount of truth disguised as elegant artifice….

Stop for a moment and consider the child as artist. In a sense every child is an artist. Just as the intricately-contrived private lunacies of madmen are at heart one with the creative act, so too, the uninhibited crayon scrawls of an infant are the joyously self-indulgent motions of an artist. Art is a magic act. The Cro-Magnon of Lascaux knew that; Picasso knows it too. Children dwell in a world of magic. At will, any child can conjure up surroundings more desirable than the material world of his elders; he, too, is a magician, an artist.

Although Steven Millhauser knows this, his narrator, young Jeffrey Cartwright, does not. Disappointed by Edwin Mullhouse's answers to his queries into the meaning...