Edwin Mullhouse etc is by far the most interesting and inventive of the three novels under review. It is also, with all its knowing brilliance, the most irritating - relentlessly clever, frequently cloying. The story it tells is that of the life and aesthetically pleasing death by suicide of Edwin, 11-year-old author of Cartoons, a novel, we are told, of genius. It is also that of Edwin's biographer, Jeffrey, a mere half-year older, whose exhaustively solemn record of his lifelong friend's minutest peculiarities and achievements continually draws attention away from its subject. This tension between subject and biographer is central to the novel, and has wider, at times metaphysical, implications.

LRB 6 December 1979 | PDF Download