ある夢想者の肖像

by Steven Millhauser

Millhauser's second book, a novel about the days and daydreams of an American boy drenched with adolescent yearning.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Literature

Tankobon Hardcover

First published August 12, 1977

About the author

Millhauser was born in New York City, grew up in Connecticut, and earned a B.A. from Columbia University in 1965. He then pursued a doctorate in English at Brown University. He never completed his dissertation but wrote parts of Edwin Mullhouse and From the Realm of Morpheus in two separate stays at Brown. Between times at the university, he wrote Portrait of a Romantic at his parents' house in Connecticut. His story "The Invention of Robert Herendeen" (in The Barnum Museum) features a failed student who has moved back in with his parents; the story is loosely based on this period of Millhauser's life.

Until the Pulitzer Prize, Millhauser was best known for his 1972 debut novel, Edwin Mullhouse. This novel, about a precocious writer whose career ends abruptly with his death at age eleven, features the fictional Jeffrey Cartwright playing Boswell to Edwin's Johnson. Edwin Mullhouse brought critical acclaim, and Millhauser followed with a second novel, Portrait of a Romantic, in 1977, and his first collection of short stories, In The Penny Arcade, in 1986.

Possibly the most well-known of his short stories is "Eisenheim the Illusionist" (published in "The Barnum Museum"), based on a pseudo-mythical tale of a magician who stunned audiences in Vienna in the latter part of the 19th century. It was made into the film, The Illusionist (2006).

Millhauser's stories often treat fantasy themes in a manner reminiscent of Poe or Borges, with a distinctively American voice. As critic Russell Potter has noted, "in (Millhauser's stories), mechanical cowboys at penny arcades come to life; curious amusement parks, museums, or catacombs beckon with secret passageways and walking automata; dreamers dream and children fly out their windows at night on magic carpets."

Millhauser's collections of stories continued with The Barnum Museum (1990), Little Kingdoms (1993), and The Knife Thrower and Other Stories (1998). The unexpected success of Martin Dressler in 1997 brought Millhauser increased attention. Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories made the New York Times Book Review list of "10 Best Books of 2008".

Millhauser lives in Saratoga Springs, New York and teaches at Skidmore College.

Reviews

[karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

why are books allowed to go out of print?? especially quality books, while ghastly interchangeable pastel chicklit books are allowed to be churned out to clog the shelves year after year? this one particularly surprises me, because it's steven millhauser, ftlog. all of his other books are in print, he's got a pulitzer; what more do you need to keep one lousy book in print? i'm noticing more and more as i am ordering for the store that publishers just aren't able to keep things in print anymore, or are making only very small batches of certain backlist titles. one week, three or four "table books" will no longer be available, then they will come back, then be unavailable again. it makes me sad because on the one hand - i want them to go out and have a chance to sell, on the other hand, i want to protect them as though they are the frail endangered species, the Last Copies, and not let the others get their hands on them. sometimes it works out - obscene bird of night came back into print in a big way and i immediately ordered an unreasonable amount of copies just in case, as though i am preparing for some literary apocalypse and the store is my book bomb shelter. but this book i have never been able to get in the store, and it is my favorite millhauser, which makes it difficult for the readers advisory part of my job. "yes, millhauser is good, but you should really try to find portrait of a romantic - its the very best." honesty loses sales.sigh. mike didn't like this book, but reading his review made me realize how much it really is like fortress of solitude, without any of the popular culture references. when i read this book, f.o.s. was not even a thought in young lethem's head, so i never mentally compared the two. now i want to read them over back-to-back. i loved both books, millhauser's is just a darker, more fantastic, magical-realismy version. young boys and their suburban death-fascinations. this book should almost be required reading for middle school boys.

come to my blog!

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Your opinion of this book (apparently a major influence on Lethem's Fortress of Solitude) will depend largely on your tolerance for 1) alliteration and repetition, 2) an adjective-per-page average of about 15, and 3) a depiction of suburban thanatos so tame and listless it makes Dandelion Wine look like Revolutionary Road. I slogged through it, but damned if Fortress of Solitude doesn't rise miles above its predecessor.

[Stewart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crazy good.

[Philippe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book for the first time when I was in my early twenties. In those days, Millhauser's claustrofobic evocation of adolescent boredom, yearning and desire for transgression made a powerful impression on me. Now, twenty years hence, I reread "Portrait" and am happy to say the book held itself up well to my scrutiny as a more mature reader.

Millhauser's prose is as experimental as I remembered it. It's a stream-of-consciousness kind of writing which modulates between a most dazzlingly virtuosic rendering of an adolescent's sensorial world and their feverish internal monologues and incantations. Here and there, but seldom, this threatens to spill over in long-windedness. His characters are lifelike, his evocation of time and space is masterly.

There's one thing which strikes me now as unnatural and it is a feature that struck when reading this author's Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer as well: judging from these two books, Millhauser has the habit of artificially staging his narrative in distinct sections. In "Portrait", Arthur Grumm, the protagonist, builds a close relationship with several of his school friends but this happens strictly sequentially. Once a relationship unwinds, the character (Philip Schoolcraft, Eleanor Schuman) disappears completely from the narrative. In "Martin Dressler", the main character builds a series of hotels, each of them a grander version of the former. Once a new hotel is finished he never revisits any of his other properties.

These relationships seem to operate like shells which the protagonist throws off and never revisits again. As a narrative strategy it only partially works with Millhauser. On the one hand he is a master in evoking the (phenomenological) richness (and messiness) of the real world, but that impression is oddly countered by these artificial narrative compartments which one never comes across in real life.

Anyway, "Martin Dressler" suffers more from this than "Portrait" which remains a very compelling survey of the darker sides of a bored, middle-class adolescent psyche.

[Adrien · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ahh, adolescence, the first explorations of the concepts of (amorous) love and death. Plus the struggles against loneliness and boredom. All brought to you with Millhauser's combination of dreamlike haze and exceptional detail. If it doesn't pull you along like Martin Dressler, it does resonate with your inner, angst ridden adolescent.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is amazingly descriptive, it's not a romance at all which everyone who sees it thinks. It's a well-crafted story about Adolescence that will make you cry, laugh, and relive your own teenage years. Millhauser is an amazing author and if you run across this book I would highly recommend it. Or check it out at the library, great read!

[Christian Schwoerke · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've enjoyed the verbal facility and narrative cleverness of Millhauser in his Edwin Mullhouse and his Martin Dressler, and for a while I enjoyed it in this novel. The hermetic world of anticipation that the narrator creates is claustrophobic, and yet every nuance of portent is just that, one more portent, always one after another. It palls, and I believe that's the intent: to create a work that is on the verge of something, always on the verge... For that, well done. For most mortals, the joke wears thin.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book will haunt me for days. I was absolutely enthralled.

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

As much as I love Millhauser, this early work was a slog. I would call this book an apprentice piece. The young author was still developing his craft.

[A.D. Jansen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Portrait of a Romantic works as an exhaustive catalogue of painstakingly reimagined childhood memories. It is also, at times, an exceptionally vivid evocation of adolescent ennui. As an actual novel, though, it is overlong, numbingly repetitive, and unsatisfying. I am not surprised that Millhauser eventually turned to short stories and hasn't turned away from them since; he seems totally adrift in a work of this length. I get that aimlessness is kind of his subject here, and it makes sense that the shape of the book would reflect that. Still, a novel of this length (the number of pages is somewhat deceptive, since each page is a massive WALL of text--chapters entirely devoid of paragraph breaks are not uncommon) could use a solid through-line or two. Nothing in the book really develops into what you might call "narrative"; it's just a jumble of episodes and observations, interspersed with longwinded passages in which nothing happens exquisitely. Millhauser introduces some compelling and well-drawn side characters (Eleanor was my favorite, I would have loved a book about just her and Arthur) but allows them to evaporate as soon as he can't think of anything else to do with them. And his meticulous attention to detail, a strength of his in the short story format, becomes an irritating tic at novel-length, when time and time again he takes pages to render descriptions that could be summed up in a sentence or two. As many flashes of genius as the book contains (and it's Millhauser, so there are lots), I can't help but feel that his subject got away from him here, and ended up swallowing his book whole.

[Aras · Rating 2 out of 5]

This novel has some very mixed moods, sometimes being quite readable and interesting, while other times going on with mind-numbing details for pages and pages. It asks a lot from a reader; too much. This book was just dying for more humour to take down the narrator a few pegs anytime he became overwrought.