A Modest Plea to Publishers

Steven Millhauser's first novel, "Portrait of a Romantic," is now out of print; a fact that should have literary scholars hammering their fists against the doors of publishers nation-wide. I can't illustrate with enough gravity what a tragedy this is.
Set in Millhauser's native Connecticut, we follow the life of Arthur Grumm, a self-professed, disenchanted romantic. For Arthur, the world is a perpetual bore, rarely yielding more than a passing, or mysterious glimpse of the ecstasy and exaltation he so fervently craves. He is not a particularly compelling character. In fact, he does very little throughout the course of the book. Yearning seems to constitute his sole enterprise. But what drives the novel is a mysterious sense of nostalgia and the inevitable promise of tragedy. Nostalgia because Arthur vividly evokes the immense desires of childhood and the disproportionately small world that he inhabits. The theme of suicide emerges immediately, and the entire novel is pervaded by a sepulchral sense of death and decay.
The few friends that Arthur manages to make throughout the narrative are as strange as the story itself. All three share a peculiar morbidity and Arthur never manages to escape the shadow that this casts over his life.
The prose is filled with Millhauser's trademark precision and acute attention to detail. The scenes of the book are so vivid that they come across as vignettes rather than paragraphs, images on a screen, rather than a collection of words assembled for the laborious task of reading from left to right . Some now-familiar themes emerge in the story: uncanny, life-like toys, board games, the enchanting night and the spell of the moon.
Again, not too much happens throughout the story. "Portrait of a Romantic" is not so much about events as it is about the passage of youth itself. Moreover, moments become more important than events. Millhauser seems to truly relish all of the smallest details that would commonly be consigned to the mundane by most. But like the stories of the late John Updike, one of the unspoken themes of this little gem seems to be that there is no such thing as the mundane. Personally, I found myself rushing home after work every night to return to Millhauser's sad and delicate world, turning the pages rapidly, always awaiting some revelation that would fix this sad Werther of the 1970s.
That said, we need to see this in print again. It is one of those few books that occupies a position of unquestionable importance, without providing an immediate answer as to why.