SOURCE: "When Fairy Tales Come True," in The Washington Post, April 28, 1996, p. 3.

[In the following review, the critic provides a plot summary and positive review of Martin Dressler.]

Steven Millhauser is a wonderfully gifted and original writer who had the rather considerable misfortune to write an absolutely brilliant first novel. Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943–54 was published in 1972—it has just been reissued in paperback by Vintage—and was reviewed with near-universal enthusiasm. It is at once a satire of literary biography, an evocation of childhood and an exploration of the creative mind; it is clever without being showy, its intelligence is daunting, and it has a surprisingly powerful effect upon the reader's emotions.

The problem with writing so thoroughly accomplished a first novel is that it arouses undue expectations about those to follow. In a literary culture such as ours, one that...