That's All, Folks

By Martha Duffy

EDWIN MULLHOUSE, THE LIFE AND DEATH OF AN AMERICAN WRITER, 1943-1954, BY JEFFREY CARTWRIGHT

by STEVEN MILLHAUSER

305 pages. Knopf. $6.95.

Pale Fire was Vladimir Nabokov's triumphant literary joke about the attempts of a mad pedant to write about the life and work of a poet whom he barely knew and whose qualities eluded him completely. The book seemed to be the very last laugh at the extremes of the New Criticism--destructive works of literary detection, prolix biographies, and any number of other sins against common sense and the simple enjoyment of art.

It seemed unlikely that anyone would try to outdo Nabokov at his own game, but Steven Millhauser, a Brown University graduate student, has given it a game try in a really promising short novel. His jokes are broader than Nabokov's and are not woven into the story with nearly the master's exquisite timing. But he is witty, and his conceit --making both the artist and his biographer small boys--is elastic enough to stretch the length of the book.

As the extended title indicates, Novelist Mullhouse lived a mere eleven years, and his output, aside from a few little stories, was a "novel" called Cartoons, inspired by innumerable comic books and animated movie features. Though mildly precocious, Edwin is in fact a rather ordinary little fellow. The one to watch is Jeffrey Cartwright, a rare demon in the Nabokovian mold. With his "extraordinary, truly inspired memory," Jeffrey recalls his first meeting with Edwin, which occurred when the former was six months old and the latter but a few days. From that moment, Jeffrey preys upon the unfortunate Edwin, and after his untimely death launches into his "biography" with a confident zeal that would give pause to Leon Edel.

As a biographer, Jeffrey shares the mania for list making that afflicts everyone from Joyce to Susan Sontag. There are catalogues of Edwin's first utterances ("nnnn" for complaining, "kkkk" for giggling and "chff" -- "an early version of Jeffrey?"); the 54 books Edwin owned at age two. There are also bull's-eye descriptions of the exquisite boredom of kindergarten, and a fine malevolent parody of children's picture books called The Lonely Island ("Sometimes rain came to the island...but then it went away...The island dreamed "of an ocean with many islands...The island woke up. It saw...another island and...another island...").

After such fare, young Edwin turns to cartoons with enthusiasm. He starts by saying things like "Thanks, Mister," with appropriate cartoon intonation. Then comes a little poem written on the death of a friend that ends with "That's all, folks!" Mullhouse's novel, which also ends with the immortal cartoon closing line from Looney Tunes, seals its author's literary future. Jeffrey decides that his own mission in life is to immortalize his friend in a biography. His next thought is that it is damned inconvenient for a biographer to have a living subject messing things up. To reveal more would be unfair. Significantly, both little boys love to hear Edwin's father recite Abdul, the Bulbul Amir, but Father can never remember how the poem ends.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.