Books like Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright

I originally read this book in my sophomore year of high school, and remember little about it except that I liked it. Reading it again, it turns out that Edwin Mullhouse is actually one of my favorite books; if I didn't know any better, I'd also venture that it's been a fairly significant influence on my own sporadic attempts at fiction. Huh.There's a lot going on here: a parody of the impulse to biography (since the narrator is a sixth-grader and the subject is his next-door neighbor and playmate, the parody is mostly implicit, so that Millhauser can go in for some straight-played analysis and leave it to the reader to remember who's doing the talking), a pretty sophisticated first-person narrator of uncertain reliability, and so on. Mostly, though, it's a precisely described, regally dictated catalog of childhood memory (that is, personal) and postwar Americana (that is, universal); the idea, which is a dominant and explict theme in Millhauser's recent short fiction, is that language (or, more generally, any kind of art or other vehicle), if utilized to its fullest potential, can grant us access to the totality of experience. We would be able to remember everything, if only we could find the right words for all of it.