There are worse fates than that of a writer's writer. A tenured teaching gig, the esteem of one's literary peers, a small but devoted cult of readers, and even a Pulitzer Prize to bring one's older books back into print: what the writer's writer lacks in royalties and recognition, he more than makes up in perks and influence. In Steven Millhauser's case, that influence even extends to the film world: The Illusionist, Edward Norton's latest vehicle, is based on an old short story by Millhauser.

But it all began in 1972 with Edwin Mullhouse, Millhauser's first — and still his most revered — novel. At once a pastiche of literary biography, a send-up of the cultishness surrounding artists, and a meticulous portrait of a mid-century American childhood, the novel has a convoluted central conceit. It purports to be a biography of a writer who died far too young, written by an 11-year-old named Jeffrey Cartwright. "Edwin Mullhouse is dead," says Jeffrey of his best friend, in the preface. From the novel's beginning, then, we know its end. As Boswell to Edwin's Johnson, Jeffrey sees Edwin's brief life as a study in the development of artistic genius, culminating in a creative supernova — a novel called Cartoons, completed just before Mullhouse's suicide on his 11th birthday. Jeffrey is Edwin's first mate, his amanuensis, his chief assistant, and his sidekick — in awe of his hero and happy to be along for the ride. But the ordinariness of Edwin's life and work, recounted in minute detail, belies Jeffrey's hagiographical, hyperbolic insistence — which sounds at times like nothing so much as James Lipton on Inside the Actor's Studio — of his friend's genius.

Who's the genius after all, then? In the end, the presence that looms over the novel is not Edwin's but his biographer's. By itself, Edwin's story is mere child's play; it takes Jeffrey's incandescent prose — Nabokovian in its verve and intelligence, its humor and bombast — to make it worth telling, and worth reading. For that we can thank Millhauser, who wouldn't be a writers' writer if more of us read him. This a great place to start.

-Chris Parris-Lamb