Little could James Joyce have foreseen the avalanche of cliché he was setting in motion when he began A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with [a] now legendary sentence…. In thousands of first novels since Joyce's revolutionary use of the baby artist's earliest lisping literacies half a century ago, a precocious horde of sensitive, rebellious, grimly ambitious children—every last one of them wise and gifted beyond his tender years—have marched to the same leitmotif: The child is father of the novelist, and the proper study of a young writer is Himself when young.

It has been left to the ingenious imagination of still another first novelist, a Brown University graduate student named Steven Millhauser, to stand the Künstlerroman genre on its swollen head in Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943–1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright…. Not in the least by...