What I Am Reading: "Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright" by Steven Millhauser

This novel, the last for now picked from the postmodern fiction list, is a faux-biography of a fairly typical suburban Middle American kid in the ‘50s, who happens to try his hand at writing and ends up writing a novel, Cartoons, intensely praised by his biographer. This is his friend and next-door neighbor, Jeffrey Cartwright, who produces a slightly-overwritten but scrupulously detailed story of Edwin's early, middle, and late years. Chronicled by Jeffrey are Edwin's early creative efforts, including baby talk; his consumption of children's literature and media, his experiences in school, early poetry and stories, and eventually his feverish and melancholic writing process that produces his magnum opus.

Along the way, Edwin has formative experiences involving a crush on a classmate, the antagonistic Rose Dorn, a strange friendship with a neighborhood tough, Arnold Hasselstrom, and a brief interaction with another creative youth, Edward Penn. These encounters come to fruition when a chapter covers the contents of Cartoons, clearly inspired by the events of Edwin's life. As a young comic devotee (cartoon comics, not more "adult" content) he met Penn, a sickly youth who created his own comics and cartoons in a grungy basement studio. He is represented in Edwin’s novel as a ghost that the Edwin stand-in cartoon protagonist of Cartoons visits, after following a river (just as Penn's house was down a river from Edwin's), in order to view his creations, photorealistic images in the otherwise cartoon world of Edwin's novel. From there, he travels into a forest to a haunted mansion, where he spies on a sleeping princess before her witch captor chases him around the mansion, which burns down. This is analogous to Rose Dorn, Edwin's unrequited love interest, who lived with her "witch" mother in an old house outside of town until it burned down, killing both. On the Edwin character's way home, he ends up in an unfamiliar town, and following the only visible light to its source, finds a wolf chained in a cellar. The wolf is lashed by its owner, and Edwin's stand-in is unable to save him before fleeing. This represents Arnold Hasselstrom, an exchange student who transfers into Edwin and Jeffrey’s school. Despite Edwin's status as a good student and a rule-follower, he becomes friends with Hasselstrom, who is often fighting or otherwise in trouble. Their stoic opposites-attract friendship eventually falls apart due to a lack of shared interests or values, and Edwin rejects his overtures to continue spending time together. Hasselstrom eventually ends up killing his juvie officer and dying in a shootout with police. After the character in Edwin's book flees this wolf scene, he finds himself back at the cartoon stand-in for Edwin's house, where he is killed by the mysterious shadow who has been following him around the entire novel.

To explain that: throughout the story, always at Edwin's side is Jeffrey, recording with a deliberate absence of malice all of Edwin's foibles and general childish insecurities and shortcomings. At the time these exploits tend to meander, but never quite get bogged down, and are tied together really well by Cartoons in the end. Despite praising Edwin as a genius, Jeffrey does not portray him as one, as Jeffrey's analysis of Edwin's literary themes and life trajectory are met with a lack of interest or understanding by the writer. Jeffrey addresses the audience often mainly about the travails and rewards of the biographer, and how hard he worked to put things in chronological order instead of only providing impressions. It was important to Jeffrey that Edwin's life be portrayed as a closed loop, and this may be why, after his completion of Cartoons, Edwin wishes to close the loop himself, and begins making plans to commit suicide on his eleventh birthday. He and Jeffrey are both remarkably sanguine about this. The reader has been informed by Jeffrey's narration that Edwin came to a gristly end anyway, but the final pages are filled with dread as Edwin lives out his last night playing with his family and his friend, then cavorting around his room while he waits for the early-morning hour that he was born in to strike. Eventually, at the climactic moment, he holds the gun he received long ago from Arnold Hassestrom to his head and shouts BANG, and falls over. Jeffrey then helps him close the loop on his story in the same way the shadowy figure did in Cartoons.

Though lampooning the conventions and self-importance of biography, this ending drives home the commentary on the relationship between biographer and subject, especially a modern biographer whose subject may not have passed into the pages of history quite yet. It is a dramatic execution of the dark, underlying morbidity of the idea that a person's life on the page can the most important thing to the biographer; it reminds me of the film Capote where Truman Capote doesn't make every effort to save Perry Smith, the subject of In Cold Blood, from being executed.

Jeffrey is a fun, predatory narrator; I think there was a strong opportunity to make him an unreliable narrator where his complicity or culpability is only sneakily implied, but that was a road (or gimmick) not taken. For much of the novel I felt fairly indifferent to Edwin as a character; I only found a fondness for him after Cartoons was completed and its contents related. If a book is about a beloved artist who died prior to the story, it is important for the reader to like or be interested in them; exposure to "their art" helps this immensely. This was executed well in Radiance by Catherynne Valente, where Severin Unck is presented in both fond recollections and "first-hand" through her work.

I'm not sure how much nostalgia Millhauser meant to invoke with his '50s childhood bikes-in-suburbia setting, but it was of course reminiscent of other baby boomer tales of youth, such as those found in Stephen King, Pleasantville, that awful A Christmas Story movie or my personal favorite, "Jeffty is Five" by Harlan Ellison. It was a familiar setting, and perhaps its hazy banality (often with dark undertones) made it a good choice for a darkly comic novel. Similarly, Edwin's work with cartoons in his novel and his other work (poems and stories in the family newspaper) may be a sincere appreciation of a medium that kids in that era (and every subsequent era) were exposed to, or it may mock the portentousness of postmodern types who view such things as important art, which is not to say that they are or are not. I don’t quite know enough about the author to say whether this is remotely on-target. However, regardless of the level of sarcasm on display, the novel always played its ridiculousness straight-faced. Witness both below:

If distortion is the essence of Edwin’s diction, the means to distortion is of course the animated cartoon, whose influence on Edwin’s art I have promised to discuss. It was the animated cartoon that taught Edwin to combine the precise and the impossible. It was the animated cartoon that provided him with a whole bagful of comic tricks. It was the animated cartoon, far more than the solemn and sentimental adventure film, that acknowledged frankly a violence in things, and provided Edwin with a method of reflecting the violence he had witnessed in the course of his own quiet life. It was the animated cartoon that provided him with the central theme of pursuit, which in his hands seemed to be transformed into a vision of Destiny. But even more important, it was the animated cartoon that influenced the very soul or spirit of his book. In the last chapter of Part Two I mentioned a certain disturbing quality in Edwin’s list of cartoon titles, a quality that I described as a repellent cuteness. Now I do not mean that Edwin was blind to this quality of cartoons, on the contrary he was especially sensitive to it and sought it out deliberately for his book. For it is Edwin’s achievement to have discovered Beauty not in the merely commonplace, not in the merely ugly, not in the merely malodorous and disgusting, but in the lowest of the low, in the vilest of the vile: in the trivial, in the trite, in the repellently cute. And if, with Edwin’s permission, I may briefly leave the narrow bounds of the personal for the free fields of the socially significant, I think it is permissible to say that in his immortal masterpiece the false images that feed our American dreams - the technicolor and stardust through which America, poor savage inarticulate giant, expresses her soul - are in a manner purified, are used seriously in a serious work of art but without losing their gimcrack quality, so that every syllable (written in blood, gentlemen, in blood) seems to plead to be taken as a joke only. It is as if Edwin wanted you to discover, as the hidden intention of his book, the cute grin of a cartoon cherub - whereas that grin is itself the mask, beneath which lies a grimace of earnestness. For it was Edwin’s peculiar vanity to wish to seem not quite serious. (p. 266-7)